Obviously I'm not writing about this until today because the day-of I was too offended, tired and did I mention offended? By what had happened to actually re-live it by writing about it. And I'm not even going to write about it that much because that's all anyone in New York has been talking about for the past 48 hours - "How the Rain Ruined My Wednesday."
And yes it was rain, just a lot of it, that forced me to have to walk 40+ blocks to work this week. And I won't even go into the heat, the crowds (your poor, your tired, your huddled masses...), my overall confusion that didn't clear until I walked from 68th to almost 34th (which didn't include my cross-town excursion) that we weren't in fact, being attacked by terrorists, and the sad, painful state of my feet (poor little toes!) by the time I reached the office - two and a half hours after I left my apartment.
Around 34th street I had been looking for a place in which to buy some cheap flip flops for the rest of my journey, when I spotted two people ready to grab the one seemingly free cab in the entire city, and chased them down and demanded we spilt it. Had I not done so, I'm not entirely sure I would even actually still have feet right now.
I digress. The point here isn't to write angrily about the MTA and how they, the largest mass transit system in the world, totally dropped the ball yet again and ruined the Wednesday (and a perfectly good one at that!) of millions of honest working New Yorkers.
The point is, is that we’re all just trying to make it happen in what sometimes truly becomes the most difficult and frustrating of places to live in of all time. And yet we know this, and we still think it’s okay. We accept it like you do the snoring habits of a significant other.
Yeah, it’s annoying, and yeah, you can’t remember when you last had an uninterrupted nights sleep and sometimes you think about leaving them in order to find someone without that deviated septum. But in the end I guess you realize that it’s worth it, to overlook such things because in the end they really are, despite their faults one of a kind.
August 9, 2007
August 7, 2007
Who needs sleep?
Well August is here and August in New York means that suddenly the summer is coming to a rapid end, and everything you told yourself you were going to do way back in the spring, ("as soon as summer is here I can’t wait to...") you realize that you haven’t even attempted.
All those movies in Bryant Park, restaurants known for their patio tables, hotels and their roof decks, Shakespeare in the Park (p.s. the most difficult thing to make happen in New York)....and that grand plan to befriend someone with a house in the Hamptons.
I know, a lofty expectation, however I’d like to note that it’s The Gay who came up with the whole friend-with-house-in-Hamptons scheme. He’s only just gotten a dresser (pls. refer to The Dresser) so I think obtaining a friend with a nice by-the-beach pad is a little grandiose at the moment.
Regardless,the point is, is that it’s so much easier to talk about doing things than actually doing them. I think in New York we do so much all the time that if we were to actually go through with everything we talked about, if we actually took advantage of everything that is available to us at every moment of every day - we’d never sleep. Ok, ok, I realize now that yes, New York is known as The City That Never Sleeps - but let me tell you, it does. And we do. We have to.
And maybe it’s not enough for all we do, the long commutes, the constant barrage of people all pushing you to get somewhere, the heat the seeps up from the pavement and closes in around your ankles every morning and makes the air heavy to breathe. The late nights at the office, the pressure that you’re not staying late enough, the pressure that you’re not in the right office or the right apartment or the right place at the right time (New York should be known as The City That Never Has Time).
In fact, things get so bad that sometimes you don’t even realize you’re awake. Sitting on the subway the other day, I was jammed in against a woman who was taking up more than her fair share of the seat, doing a crossword puzzle over the top of her glasses, mouth open as she moved her pencil back and forth over all of the Up and Down clues. On the other side was a guy with the typical male uniform of a blue dress shirt and khaki pants reading The Post. I myself was reading a book, wedged in between.
I like to say I was engrossed in the inner witticisms of Evelyn Waugh - however the truth is - I think that whole pages elapsed where I didn’t have a clue what was going on, where I entirely spaced out - because in a moment I looked up and there was no one on the bench to the left of me. The woman and her crossword puzzle was gone, and all that was left in our car was a few people across from me, and the guy in the blue dress shirt reading the Post who I now realized I was leaning up against.
After the initial embarrassment settled in I allowed the next lurch and stop of the train to slyly propel me away from him, though I’m pretty sure he was inwardly wondering what was wrong with me, because at that moment he leaned forward, made a grand gesture of putting his elbows on his knees and spread The Post out in font of him as if to say, "umm, that was weird." (Whoops).
So we aren’t exactly the city that never sleeps, but we like to keep that overall glowing opinion of ourselves, so we try to hide it well. And August is here (already!) and we still have three weeks to make some of those spring promises happen before the chill of fall settles in (before we know it).
So I guess I’ll just have to be sure to make a note to get to bed early.
All those movies in Bryant Park, restaurants known for their patio tables, hotels and their roof decks, Shakespeare in the Park (p.s. the most difficult thing to make happen in New York)....and that grand plan to befriend someone with a house in the Hamptons.
I know, a lofty expectation, however I’d like to note that it’s The Gay who came up with the whole friend-with-house-in-Hamptons scheme. He’s only just gotten a dresser (pls. refer to The Dresser) so I think obtaining a friend with a nice by-the-beach pad is a little grandiose at the moment.
Regardless,the point is, is that it’s so much easier to talk about doing things than actually doing them. I think in New York we do so much all the time that if we were to actually go through with everything we talked about, if we actually took advantage of everything that is available to us at every moment of every day - we’d never sleep. Ok, ok, I realize now that yes, New York is known as The City That Never Sleeps - but let me tell you, it does. And we do. We have to.
And maybe it’s not enough for all we do, the long commutes, the constant barrage of people all pushing you to get somewhere, the heat the seeps up from the pavement and closes in around your ankles every morning and makes the air heavy to breathe. The late nights at the office, the pressure that you’re not staying late enough, the pressure that you’re not in the right office or the right apartment or the right place at the right time (New York should be known as The City That Never Has Time).
In fact, things get so bad that sometimes you don’t even realize you’re awake. Sitting on the subway the other day, I was jammed in against a woman who was taking up more than her fair share of the seat, doing a crossword puzzle over the top of her glasses, mouth open as she moved her pencil back and forth over all of the Up and Down clues. On the other side was a guy with the typical male uniform of a blue dress shirt and khaki pants reading The Post. I myself was reading a book, wedged in between.
I like to say I was engrossed in the inner witticisms of Evelyn Waugh - however the truth is - I think that whole pages elapsed where I didn’t have a clue what was going on, where I entirely spaced out - because in a moment I looked up and there was no one on the bench to the left of me. The woman and her crossword puzzle was gone, and all that was left in our car was a few people across from me, and the guy in the blue dress shirt reading the Post who I now realized I was leaning up against.
After the initial embarrassment settled in I allowed the next lurch and stop of the train to slyly propel me away from him, though I’m pretty sure he was inwardly wondering what was wrong with me, because at that moment he leaned forward, made a grand gesture of putting his elbows on his knees and spread The Post out in font of him as if to say, "umm, that was weird." (Whoops).
So we aren’t exactly the city that never sleeps, but we like to keep that overall glowing opinion of ourselves, so we try to hide it well. And August is here (already!) and we still have three weeks to make some of those spring promises happen before the chill of fall settles in (before we know it).
So I guess I’ll just have to be sure to make a note to get to bed early.
August 1, 2007
Bridge Over Troubled Water.
What are we really supposed to do with ourselves when we finally realize that we have absolutely no control over anything?
I started to feel that realization sink in when I was stuck underground today on the way home from work on the 1 train for twenty minutes. I was standing and trying to read while the announcement kept saying things like "smoke" and "at 95th street," and my brain couldn’t stop from turning to the same questions of: why aren’t we moving? How long am I going to be trapped under here? and, When did this become my life?
Give anyone some time trapped underground in a subway full of sweaty, tired, angry New Yorkers and you’re bound to question the deeper things in your life - namely all the things that seem to be going wrong that you can’t control.
The thing about realizing a thing like that, is that you don’t really realize it until it happens to you. Sure, you can walk about thinking you’ve had quite a few miles on the highway without a front wheel blowout. You’ve had perhaps one too many close calls where you weren’t entirely paying attention when you crossed the street. You can be like Gregory Wernick Sr. of Rockford, Illinois who drove over the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis shortly before it collapsed.
He stopped to get a drink nearby and heard commotion, so he went back. "I figure I crossed about 10 minutes before it happened," he said. "That’s just too close to call."
Because that’s what life is anyway, isn’t it? A bunch of close calls. And when we think about those miles on the highway, or those times in the middle of busy 42nd street, or Gregory - we can recognize that its never actually happened to us.
What I want to know is: what are you really supposed to do with yourself when you’re one of those people who is just sitting there, sitting in rush hour traffic, stuck, bumper to bumper after a long day at the office, waiting to get home for an even longer night of making dinner and talking about your day and having sex and going to sleep - just listening to the radio or talking on the phone, or thinking to yourself that you still don’t know how it is that you ended up here, and the bridge you’re idling on just collapses beneath you.
What I want to know is: what is anyone supposed to do when they’re falling through the air and into the waters of the Mississippi, their cell phone dropping from their hand, their thoughts changing quicky to: What’s happening? What if this is it? How did it get here? Why have I not done more?
The only way, I’ve found, is to find a bright side. Not too bright of course, but bright enough so that you’ll have a way to get through the next day knowing that you’re just out there, every day, just out there in the open and anything could happen at any time.
The bright side, I figure, is that once the call finally isn’t close, once the call is actually for you and you alone - living through it will have reminded you that now, all those times you find yourself stuck underground on the 1, or idling in our car on a bridge and asking the questions of how you got here and what it is that you’re really doing - you should at least be able to realize that it’s quick, life, that’s what it is, and it’s all chances and calls (close or far away) and you shouldn’t waste any more time trying to figure it all out.
Because the water is always there, waiting.
I started to feel that realization sink in when I was stuck underground today on the way home from work on the 1 train for twenty minutes. I was standing and trying to read while the announcement kept saying things like "smoke" and "at 95th street," and my brain couldn’t stop from turning to the same questions of: why aren’t we moving? How long am I going to be trapped under here? and, When did this become my life?
Give anyone some time trapped underground in a subway full of sweaty, tired, angry New Yorkers and you’re bound to question the deeper things in your life - namely all the things that seem to be going wrong that you can’t control.
The thing about realizing a thing like that, is that you don’t really realize it until it happens to you. Sure, you can walk about thinking you’ve had quite a few miles on the highway without a front wheel blowout. You’ve had perhaps one too many close calls where you weren’t entirely paying attention when you crossed the street. You can be like Gregory Wernick Sr. of Rockford, Illinois who drove over the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis shortly before it collapsed.
He stopped to get a drink nearby and heard commotion, so he went back. "I figure I crossed about 10 minutes before it happened," he said. "That’s just too close to call."
Because that’s what life is anyway, isn’t it? A bunch of close calls. And when we think about those miles on the highway, or those times in the middle of busy 42nd street, or Gregory - we can recognize that its never actually happened to us.
What I want to know is: what are you really supposed to do with yourself when you’re one of those people who is just sitting there, sitting in rush hour traffic, stuck, bumper to bumper after a long day at the office, waiting to get home for an even longer night of making dinner and talking about your day and having sex and going to sleep - just listening to the radio or talking on the phone, or thinking to yourself that you still don’t know how it is that you ended up here, and the bridge you’re idling on just collapses beneath you.
What I want to know is: what is anyone supposed to do when they’re falling through the air and into the waters of the Mississippi, their cell phone dropping from their hand, their thoughts changing quicky to: What’s happening? What if this is it? How did it get here? Why have I not done more?
The only way, I’ve found, is to find a bright side. Not too bright of course, but bright enough so that you’ll have a way to get through the next day knowing that you’re just out there, every day, just out there in the open and anything could happen at any time.
The bright side, I figure, is that once the call finally isn’t close, once the call is actually for you and you alone - living through it will have reminded you that now, all those times you find yourself stuck underground on the 1, or idling in our car on a bridge and asking the questions of how you got here and what it is that you’re really doing - you should at least be able to realize that it’s quick, life, that’s what it is, and it’s all chances and calls (close or far away) and you shouldn’t waste any more time trying to figure it all out.
Because the water is always there, waiting.
July 25, 2007
The Dresser
OK. So for those of you who don’t know, getting furniture in New York is difficult. I’ve been trying to help a friend who has been living off of their floor and out of a suitcase for about seven months now, a dresser to hold the various items that I inevitably have to step over when I come to visit. "Are you just like, going to pick those pants up off the floor tomorrow and wear them to work?" I ask. He looks at me for a moment wondering, perhaps, what is wrong with doing such a thing, and says, "Well yeah. I mean, they’re clean."
Young twenty-something’s in Manhattan who don’t have a job in investment banking, are most likely living paycheck to paycheck. After rent, what little we have left over is saved for important things like: clothes, brunch, vodka sodas, shoes, beers, and dinners. We have no extra income for the fairly inconsequential things like superfluous costly furniture – namely, dressers.
We are a group of people who would rather store our clothes in a nice pile (clean) on the floor, than risk missing brunch for two months just to save up for a dresser. We do, after all, have our priorities.
However, the other thing about Manhattan is that you can, if you look hard enough, furnish the necessary things (like some plates, say, or a mattress even) without spending an arm and a leg. Craigslist is there for those of us who have arrived (not me) and are willing to sell their old stuff for cheap (Ikea) and actually invest in something new (like, not a futon). Their trash is our treasure (yes please!), and I made it my mission to find my above mentioned friend the least trashiest trash dresser on the island.
(Note: The Dresser is also a 1983 movie (and play) starring Albert Finney (and no one who was born after 1920), that premiered with the tagline, "What happens backstage is always true drama. And often pure comedy").
In the end, it was in fact an investment banker younger than me (ugh!) getting rid of her fairly nice trash dresser with a chestnut finish, and moving across town to Riverside Drive with her boyfriend. Really? So she's able to leave behind perfectly good furniture and her rather large studio apartment to officially grow up and invest in not only a new dresser, but a relationship as well? Surely her trash-to-not-trash changeover happened too soon?
My friend and I scoffed inwardly, bitterly wishing someone nice with furniture from CB2 loved us on the West Side too, just before we proceeded to carry a dresser 12 blocks uptown.
By 68th street the sound of the wheels from the make-shift moving-cart I borrowed from my doorman was loud enough to drown out a passing fleet of fire engines, however didn’t succeed in suppressing my overall hatred of a place that does everything in its power to test you in order for you to prove that you’re worthy just to live there.
Everyone who passed us looked at us with faces of confusion or sheer entertainment. What?! My face shot back. Have you never seen a dresser before?! Sorry we all can’t be rich and successful enough to actually buy one from somewhere real and have it delivered by actual men whose job it is to deliver things!
I was at a low point. I was no longer fabulous New Yorker on the Upper East Side. I was sad poser New Yorker who resided in 10021 but was dragging a large wooden box up 2nd avenue.
After we ruined the ear drums of a few more diners alfresco, we arrived at my friends apartment and then proceeded to carry the large wooden box up five flights of stairs.
When it was finally inside, standing in all its glory, a lone piece of furniture on an otherwise barren wall, I felt a sense of satisfaction (maybe it was the fatigue) flood over me.
My friend would no longer be sifting through piles in the morning to figure out what to wear to the office, which would inevitably save him time and frustration. We had, through hard work and determination, successfully moved one more step towards the American dream – to live in a home full of…furniture.
Yes, we may not have a lot, and no, we may not be investment bankers making six figures living on the West Side in a successful relationship heading towards what might be marriage in an apartment with plush new couches and tall sturdy dressers - but by God, I thought, we’re certainly New Yorkers, where what happens backstage is always true drama - and certainly pure comedy.
Young twenty-something’s in Manhattan who don’t have a job in investment banking, are most likely living paycheck to paycheck. After rent, what little we have left over is saved for important things like: clothes, brunch, vodka sodas, shoes, beers, and dinners. We have no extra income for the fairly inconsequential things like superfluous costly furniture – namely, dressers.
We are a group of people who would rather store our clothes in a nice pile (clean) on the floor, than risk missing brunch for two months just to save up for a dresser. We do, after all, have our priorities.
However, the other thing about Manhattan is that you can, if you look hard enough, furnish the necessary things (like some plates, say, or a mattress even) without spending an arm and a leg. Craigslist is there for those of us who have arrived (not me) and are willing to sell their old stuff for cheap (Ikea) and actually invest in something new (like, not a futon). Their trash is our treasure (yes please!), and I made it my mission to find my above mentioned friend the least trashiest trash dresser on the island.
(Note: The Dresser is also a 1983 movie (and play) starring Albert Finney (and no one who was born after 1920), that premiered with the tagline, "What happens backstage is always true drama. And often pure comedy").
In the end, it was in fact an investment banker younger than me (ugh!) getting rid of her fairly nice trash dresser with a chestnut finish, and moving across town to Riverside Drive with her boyfriend. Really? So she's able to leave behind perfectly good furniture and her rather large studio apartment to officially grow up and invest in not only a new dresser, but a relationship as well? Surely her trash-to-not-trash changeover happened too soon?
My friend and I scoffed inwardly, bitterly wishing someone nice with furniture from CB2 loved us on the West Side too, just before we proceeded to carry a dresser 12 blocks uptown.
By 68th street the sound of the wheels from the make-shift moving-cart I borrowed from my doorman was loud enough to drown out a passing fleet of fire engines, however didn’t succeed in suppressing my overall hatred of a place that does everything in its power to test you in order for you to prove that you’re worthy just to live there.
Everyone who passed us looked at us with faces of confusion or sheer entertainment. What?! My face shot back. Have you never seen a dresser before?! Sorry we all can’t be rich and successful enough to actually buy one from somewhere real and have it delivered by actual men whose job it is to deliver things!
I was at a low point. I was no longer fabulous New Yorker on the Upper East Side. I was sad poser New Yorker who resided in 10021 but was dragging a large wooden box up 2nd avenue.
After we ruined the ear drums of a few more diners alfresco, we arrived at my friends apartment and then proceeded to carry the large wooden box up five flights of stairs.
When it was finally inside, standing in all its glory, a lone piece of furniture on an otherwise barren wall, I felt a sense of satisfaction (maybe it was the fatigue) flood over me.
My friend would no longer be sifting through piles in the morning to figure out what to wear to the office, which would inevitably save him time and frustration. We had, through hard work and determination, successfully moved one more step towards the American dream – to live in a home full of…furniture.
Yes, we may not have a lot, and no, we may not be investment bankers making six figures living on the West Side in a successful relationship heading towards what might be marriage in an apartment with plush new couches and tall sturdy dressers - but by God, I thought, we’re certainly New Yorkers, where what happens backstage is always true drama - and certainly pure comedy.
July 23, 2007
You've been here before.
It happens to me on occasion, where I’ve walked past the exact same apartment building that something was chasing me out of in my dream the night before. I look up for a minute at that front bay window and the greying black of the bricks and that same tree. Yes, that same exact tree was in my way last night, right there in the middle of my getaway as I ran in slow motion away from something that made so much more sense before I woke up with a start and thought with a panic "huh?" before I thought "oh," when I realized that nice thing you get to realize when bad things happen to you at night - it was just a dream.
The bad moments are when bad things happen and you’re stuck with that "huh?" moment for far longer than you’d like. You’ve been here before and it stinks worse than that pile of laundry in the corner you keep telling yourself you’ll bring to the Laundromat tomorrow.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, you lie to yourself, you’ll have more time.
And then if you’re like me and you’ve come to a state in your mind where you’re starting to forget in the fog of your life what’s real and what’s not, you’ll find yourself staring at a person on the subway the way you do when you think you know them but aren’t confident enough to speak up - and you think yourself: how do I know you?
There’s something about living in a city with so many people that if you find one person you know, if you happen to be in the same section of the same 1 train with this person, you have an obligation as a fellow lonely insignificant New Yorker to speak up, to study their face, to make the connection of: "Oh yeah, you’re Mark, right? I met you at that bar on Rivington like a month ago. You’re friends with my friend Jessica?" And then it’s "oh’s" and "ahh’s" all around as you show everyone around you and prove to yourself that you’re making something of yourself in this huge hole of a place - you know people.
But if you’re like me, you know people, sure, but not a lot of people, and chances are that this random person you’re staring at in the same section of the same 1 train isn’t anyone you’ve ever met before. Plus, you’re thinking to yourself, you’d probably really remember someone who is that cute. You just want to think that you know this person so that you have a reason to talk to them, because everyone knows that no one in New York ever talks to anyone when they don’t have to.
And he’s cute, yes, and you haven’t been on a date since....and it’s more impossible to meet someone here than...and you think to yourself that if this guy just got to know you he’d never want to leave you. He’d realize how lucky he was, how much of a catch you really are. It’s because we all know how great we are, how much potential we have - but in a city full of so many people who don’t talk to each other it’s very easy for no one to ever really get to know anyone at all.
(That, and, it is also a little known fact among all New Yorkers that men of a certain age who are relatively attractive, put together and are wearing a tie that matches his dress shirt (tucked in), and is carrying some form of briefcase (ie: no backpack), and doesn’t have a ring on his finger - is gay).
So he gets off the train at 28th street and you laugh at yourself because you realize how ridiculous you’re becoming - you know very well you didn’t know him at all. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, you lie to yourself, you’ll get it together. Is it desperation? (some would think so). Is it loneliness? (some would understand), or is it just this city taking it’s toll when all you need is to connect with someone else who doesn’t want your seat on the subway, doesn’t want to get past you on the sidewalk, doesn’t want to get in line before you at Starbucks?
Who knows. Some things don’t make sense whether you’re asleep or awake, and no one knows if their reality will ever catch up with their dreams.
And the subway carries on slow and steady, and so you do because, (huh!?), you think to yourself, you’ve been here before. Oh.
The bad moments are when bad things happen and you’re stuck with that "huh?" moment for far longer than you’d like. You’ve been here before and it stinks worse than that pile of laundry in the corner you keep telling yourself you’ll bring to the Laundromat tomorrow.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, you lie to yourself, you’ll have more time.
And then if you’re like me and you’ve come to a state in your mind where you’re starting to forget in the fog of your life what’s real and what’s not, you’ll find yourself staring at a person on the subway the way you do when you think you know them but aren’t confident enough to speak up - and you think yourself: how do I know you?
There’s something about living in a city with so many people that if you find one person you know, if you happen to be in the same section of the same 1 train with this person, you have an obligation as a fellow lonely insignificant New Yorker to speak up, to study their face, to make the connection of: "Oh yeah, you’re Mark, right? I met you at that bar on Rivington like a month ago. You’re friends with my friend Jessica?" And then it’s "oh’s" and "ahh’s" all around as you show everyone around you and prove to yourself that you’re making something of yourself in this huge hole of a place - you know people.
But if you’re like me, you know people, sure, but not a lot of people, and chances are that this random person you’re staring at in the same section of the same 1 train isn’t anyone you’ve ever met before. Plus, you’re thinking to yourself, you’d probably really remember someone who is that cute. You just want to think that you know this person so that you have a reason to talk to them, because everyone knows that no one in New York ever talks to anyone when they don’t have to.
And he’s cute, yes, and you haven’t been on a date since....and it’s more impossible to meet someone here than...and you think to yourself that if this guy just got to know you he’d never want to leave you. He’d realize how lucky he was, how much of a catch you really are. It’s because we all know how great we are, how much potential we have - but in a city full of so many people who don’t talk to each other it’s very easy for no one to ever really get to know anyone at all.
(That, and, it is also a little known fact among all New Yorkers that men of a certain age who are relatively attractive, put together and are wearing a tie that matches his dress shirt (tucked in), and is carrying some form of briefcase (ie: no backpack), and doesn’t have a ring on his finger - is gay).
So he gets off the train at 28th street and you laugh at yourself because you realize how ridiculous you’re becoming - you know very well you didn’t know him at all. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, you lie to yourself, you’ll get it together. Is it desperation? (some would think so). Is it loneliness? (some would understand), or is it just this city taking it’s toll when all you need is to connect with someone else who doesn’t want your seat on the subway, doesn’t want to get past you on the sidewalk, doesn’t want to get in line before you at Starbucks?
Who knows. Some things don’t make sense whether you’re asleep or awake, and no one knows if their reality will ever catch up with their dreams.
And the subway carries on slow and steady, and so you do because, (huh!?), you think to yourself, you’ve been here before. Oh.
July 17, 2007
Vertical New York is blocking out our sight.
I don’t know when things changed and everyone started to lose sight of themselves in the haze of other people’s lives.
All the time is the constant humming of other people’s lives in our ears, sometimes loud, sometimes drowned out by our own questions that have been testing us. Because we deep-down know, (don’t we?) that we’re just another face on just another subway, holding just another railing, hand over hand, the railing that helps us up and helps us along, helps us out of the haze.
Lost, (aren’t we?) even after so much happens, that at times we can’t help but look back and wonder how we ever made it through, how we’re still here, right now putting foot in front of foot, walking forward, walking home.
But we can’t really forget, (can we?) who we really are in the midst of all the confusion. Being in New York it’s easy to feel like you’re not measuring up, like you’re not as good as the next person, not as pretty, not as successful, not as important, not as smart, (and) without the better bag, the better apartment, betterboyfriendbetterreservationatthebetterrestaurant...
How are we, in a city full of so many people who know exactly what they want, supposed to fit in and find a place of our own? Seems like things pass so fast here that if you spend too much time thinking about what you really want you’re going to miss out on it to the one’s that already do, (and they do, don’t they?)
They know and you don’t know why, or how, or what led them into the arms of such extreme clarity that they’re able to go through each day with it all seemingly figured out. Wish we had our own personal copy of TONY delivered secretly to our apartment door every week that would tell us exactly where to go to get everything we want: Time Out New York would suddenly become Time Out [insert your name here].
Maybe that’s the thing about this city that makes you start to lose sight of yourself in the haze of other people’s lives, makes you want to skip town altogether and find a place that isn’t so threatening to your dreams - too many people all wanting the same things always means that someone is destined to end up blind...and empty-handed.
All the time is the constant humming of other people’s lives in our ears, sometimes loud, sometimes drowned out by our own questions that have been testing us. Because we deep-down know, (don’t we?) that we’re just another face on just another subway, holding just another railing, hand over hand, the railing that helps us up and helps us along, helps us out of the haze.
Lost, (aren’t we?) even after so much happens, that at times we can’t help but look back and wonder how we ever made it through, how we’re still here, right now putting foot in front of foot, walking forward, walking home.
But we can’t really forget, (can we?) who we really are in the midst of all the confusion. Being in New York it’s easy to feel like you’re not measuring up, like you’re not as good as the next person, not as pretty, not as successful, not as important, not as smart, (and) without the better bag, the better apartment, betterboyfriendbetterreservationatthebetterrestaurant...
How are we, in a city full of so many people who know exactly what they want, supposed to fit in and find a place of our own? Seems like things pass so fast here that if you spend too much time thinking about what you really want you’re going to miss out on it to the one’s that already do, (and they do, don’t they?)
They know and you don’t know why, or how, or what led them into the arms of such extreme clarity that they’re able to go through each day with it all seemingly figured out. Wish we had our own personal copy of TONY delivered secretly to our apartment door every week that would tell us exactly where to go to get everything we want: Time Out New York would suddenly become Time Out [insert your name here].
Maybe that’s the thing about this city that makes you start to lose sight of yourself in the haze of other people’s lives, makes you want to skip town altogether and find a place that isn’t so threatening to your dreams - too many people all wanting the same things always means that someone is destined to end up blind...and empty-handed.
July 12, 2007
Recipe for New York.
There comes a time in every New Yorkers life when they think to themselves: am I really going to be able to do this forever?
Case in point last weekend having to go to Port Authority to get on a bus just to go to someone’s house in New Jersey for a barbeque. It was a friends office summer party, and I came with them because in this day and age he and I are both younger-than-usual people trapped in a late-twenties-early-thirties world. These sort of office functions we go to, as not only singles, but (gasp!) unmarried, makes us feel like we’re from some alternate universe upon arrival.
I decided that in order to make a great first impression on this married and older co-workers of his who all work at an admired magazine, that I would charm this backyard gathering with a homemade blueberry pie. So I spent my Saturday afternoon baking, from scratch, a lattice pie. (Fact: most of my ideas sound really great upon their initial burst into my brain, and not until I’m deep in it do I realize how far from great the idea really is).
Running late we decided to hop in a cab to Port Authority. The pie, still warm, was placed in a paper bag and set on the seat between us. We didn’t want to miss the only bus that we knew would bring us safely to this little town somewhere across the Hudson. Close to 42nd street I lifted the pie off the seat, and saw, much to my chagrin, a pool of thick blueberry syrup had pooled within the entire bottom of the bag and was currently falling over my hands and consequently, over the entire aluminum covered pie. Shit.
My friend and I looked at each other with shock, and as I held the pie in my hands, fingers burning, I realized something else was wrong the way you know when a big storm is about to break, and began looking frantically around the cab in a very blood-covered-Jack Woltz-pulling-the-covers-back-in-his-bed sort of way. Pools of blueberry syrup were all over the back seat, and the largest of them was alongside my leg, covering the entire left leg of my madras plaid pants. Shit. Shit. Shit.
All I remember at that point was running from the cab into Port Authority holding a pie like it was on fire with blue syrup streaking down my arms as people watched in confusion and horror. Sure, it was no horse, but it was still pretty shocking. And any New Yorker who has any foul play cab experiences knows that the only thing to do in a situation like that is to simply throw money at the driver and run before they can realize what you’ve done.
There was then the line of women in the bathroom who watched as I tried to wash the blue from my arms, and I hate whoever came up with the idea of getting rid of paper towels in public restrooms and opted for those hot air dryers. There were people watching as I ran back and forth from the bathroom to the gift shop grabbing a new bag, napkins, all just in time to board the bus and show up at this party and be introduced (and sure to leave a lasting impression for all the wrong reasons), with blueberry all over my pants with a large spattering over the chest of my white shirt for good measure.
On the bus, my friend looked at me and through laughter and disbelief over how sometimes it seems like I just can’t catch a break, asked: will there come a time when we just can’t do this thing anymore?
This thing that he was referring to, of course, was New York. There are a lot of times in this city when you wonder why you go through so much just to bring a pie to a party. Perhaps there will come a time when I won’t have the energy left, and fleeing Manhattan will be the only option.
Until that time, however, I’ll tough it out, I think, for a while anyway. Or at least until I run out of unstained clothes.
Case in point last weekend having to go to Port Authority to get on a bus just to go to someone’s house in New Jersey for a barbeque. It was a friends office summer party, and I came with them because in this day and age he and I are both younger-than-usual people trapped in a late-twenties-early-thirties world. These sort of office functions we go to, as not only singles, but (gasp!) unmarried, makes us feel like we’re from some alternate universe upon arrival.
I decided that in order to make a great first impression on this married and older co-workers of his who all work at an admired magazine, that I would charm this backyard gathering with a homemade blueberry pie. So I spent my Saturday afternoon baking, from scratch, a lattice pie. (Fact: most of my ideas sound really great upon their initial burst into my brain, and not until I’m deep in it do I realize how far from great the idea really is).
Running late we decided to hop in a cab to Port Authority. The pie, still warm, was placed in a paper bag and set on the seat between us. We didn’t want to miss the only bus that we knew would bring us safely to this little town somewhere across the Hudson. Close to 42nd street I lifted the pie off the seat, and saw, much to my chagrin, a pool of thick blueberry syrup had pooled within the entire bottom of the bag and was currently falling over my hands and consequently, over the entire aluminum covered pie. Shit.
My friend and I looked at each other with shock, and as I held the pie in my hands, fingers burning, I realized something else was wrong the way you know when a big storm is about to break, and began looking frantically around the cab in a very blood-covered-Jack Woltz-pulling-the-covers-back-in-his-bed sort of way. Pools of blueberry syrup were all over the back seat, and the largest of them was alongside my leg, covering the entire left leg of my madras plaid pants. Shit. Shit. Shit.
All I remember at that point was running from the cab into Port Authority holding a pie like it was on fire with blue syrup streaking down my arms as people watched in confusion and horror. Sure, it was no horse, but it was still pretty shocking. And any New Yorker who has any foul play cab experiences knows that the only thing to do in a situation like that is to simply throw money at the driver and run before they can realize what you’ve done.
There was then the line of women in the bathroom who watched as I tried to wash the blue from my arms, and I hate whoever came up with the idea of getting rid of paper towels in public restrooms and opted for those hot air dryers. There were people watching as I ran back and forth from the bathroom to the gift shop grabbing a new bag, napkins, all just in time to board the bus and show up at this party and be introduced (and sure to leave a lasting impression for all the wrong reasons), with blueberry all over my pants with a large spattering over the chest of my white shirt for good measure.
On the bus, my friend looked at me and through laughter and disbelief over how sometimes it seems like I just can’t catch a break, asked: will there come a time when we just can’t do this thing anymore?
This thing that he was referring to, of course, was New York. There are a lot of times in this city when you wonder why you go through so much just to bring a pie to a party. Perhaps there will come a time when I won’t have the energy left, and fleeing Manhattan will be the only option.
Until that time, however, I’ll tough it out, I think, for a while anyway. Or at least until I run out of unstained clothes.
July 2, 2007
In Medias Res
One of these days I'm going to finish something (and I don't mean drinks or boring phone calls or bad movies). I mean one of these days I'm going to follow through with all the things I think about doing and talk about doing and feel in the pit of my stomach that I should.
But I keeping losing time. It flies, doesn't it? Like flies that float and land on burning lamp bulbs and disintegrate or get squashed and disappear.
For too long I have thought I have an infinite amount. And that's so easy, isn't it? With clocks everywhere counting down your every moment, quantifying and qualifying every part of your day, your everyday that never seems to change. And there will always be more vodka sodas and boring phone calls and bad movies - but not chances. You can never have too many chances.
Because one night you can go to sleep and wake up in the morning and find that time has caught up with you. And clocks stop and you don't want them to (you never do), then there you are in the middle of a sea of crowded minutes, hours, days, all struggling against the drowning chances that you know you've missed, swimming in the regret, suffocating in the realization that it’s a silly time to learn to swim when you start to drown.
One of these days I'm going to finish something so all these things that I've missed out on won't have been for nothing. We all have to find the time to learn to swim eventually.
But I keeping losing time. It flies, doesn't it? Like flies that float and land on burning lamp bulbs and disintegrate or get squashed and disappear.
For too long I have thought I have an infinite amount. And that's so easy, isn't it? With clocks everywhere counting down your every moment, quantifying and qualifying every part of your day, your everyday that never seems to change. And there will always be more vodka sodas and boring phone calls and bad movies - but not chances. You can never have too many chances.
Because one night you can go to sleep and wake up in the morning and find that time has caught up with you. And clocks stop and you don't want them to (you never do), then there you are in the middle of a sea of crowded minutes, hours, days, all struggling against the drowning chances that you know you've missed, swimming in the regret, suffocating in the realization that it’s a silly time to learn to swim when you start to drown.
One of these days I'm going to finish something so all these things that I've missed out on won't have been for nothing. We all have to find the time to learn to swim eventually.
June 26, 2007
Promenade (n): a stroll or walk, especially in a public place.
This morning walking east on 72nd street towards the bus stop for my morning routine of waiting-for-the-bus-for-the-fifty-minute-commute-across-town, a man passed me and asked me point blank how the prom was.
"How was the prom?" he asked with a big smile on his face. The prom?
I guess you always have to be prepared in New York because you just don’t know what it's going to throw at you – especially that early in the morning. The inflection of his voice at first threw me, because walking down the street on any given day I tend to hear men say the most ridiculous (and mostly crude) things to me.
But how was the prom? I was wondering how this was supposed to equal some form of pick-up line, or whatever it is these men are trying to accomplish when saying random things to random women on the street. It seemed like the verbal equivalent of a honked horn (which happens more than one would think) always leaving me to wonder: what are you really getting out of doing that except solidifying my opinion that men have not, in fact, evolved.
Prom guy was skinny with white pants and a grey t-shirt and was, I then realized, naturally, flamboyantly gay (I say naturally because I don’t think you’d find too many straight men so inquisitive about prom). He knew me. At least he thought he knew me. He thought I’d just returned from what was supposed to be the greatest experience in my teenage life up until that point, compete with hair, make-up, a limo, a cheesy pastel dress and matching vest for my too-much-hair-gelled date.
I had my big sunglasses on because it was early and I hadn’t had coffee yet and it’s been a long time since I’ve personally been to the prom, an event that, looking back, I altogether could have done without
"Ummm," I said bringing a hand tentatively up to my sunglasses thinking, should I just take them off and let him see his gaffe? But then I felt bad. I'd let our awkward moment go on for too long and his face was so genuine, his tone so concerned about the outcome of this particular girls’ night at the prom, that I couldn’t help myself but stop, pay tribute, and lie. "Ok?" I said feeling ridiculous.
Because New York is nothing if not a place where you can be whoever you want on any give day and I figured I might as well go with it. He noticed however, that I seemed confused.
"Ohhh!" he said, a hint of recognition in his voice. This is it! He realizes I am not who he thinks! "I thought you were your sister! You two look so much alike I can never tell!"
I nodded and smiled in agreement. What is wrong with this guy? The sister? Not only did he think I was someone else, he then thought I was someone else on top of being someone else! "Oh well!" I said and opened my hands in front of my like I was offering him something and shrugged my shoulders in a very it-happens-all-the-time sort of way.
I do happen to have a sister that people think I look just like and upon first meeting confuse us. She always gets upset, giving a look like, ew, I don’t look that much like her, do I? that I try not to get offended by.
Prom guy and I parted ways and I took my place in the crowd of waiting bus-goers. I could feel all their eyes on me, all silently wondering why I didn’t offer this apparent-friend more information about my twin sister’s night at the prom, not even giving so much as an "I’ll call you later," upon our departure.
But what else can you do in a city full of so many people that no one knows you enough to even know that you’re not someone else.
"How was the prom?" he asked with a big smile on his face. The prom?
I guess you always have to be prepared in New York because you just don’t know what it's going to throw at you – especially that early in the morning. The inflection of his voice at first threw me, because walking down the street on any given day I tend to hear men say the most ridiculous (and mostly crude) things to me.
But how was the prom? I was wondering how this was supposed to equal some form of pick-up line, or whatever it is these men are trying to accomplish when saying random things to random women on the street. It seemed like the verbal equivalent of a honked horn (which happens more than one would think) always leaving me to wonder: what are you really getting out of doing that except solidifying my opinion that men have not, in fact, evolved.
Prom guy was skinny with white pants and a grey t-shirt and was, I then realized, naturally, flamboyantly gay (I say naturally because I don’t think you’d find too many straight men so inquisitive about prom). He knew me. At least he thought he knew me. He thought I’d just returned from what was supposed to be the greatest experience in my teenage life up until that point, compete with hair, make-up, a limo, a cheesy pastel dress and matching vest for my too-much-hair-gelled date.
I had my big sunglasses on because it was early and I hadn’t had coffee yet and it’s been a long time since I’ve personally been to the prom, an event that, looking back, I altogether could have done without
"Ummm," I said bringing a hand tentatively up to my sunglasses thinking, should I just take them off and let him see his gaffe? But then I felt bad. I'd let our awkward moment go on for too long and his face was so genuine, his tone so concerned about the outcome of this particular girls’ night at the prom, that I couldn’t help myself but stop, pay tribute, and lie. "Ok?" I said feeling ridiculous.
Because New York is nothing if not a place where you can be whoever you want on any give day and I figured I might as well go with it. He noticed however, that I seemed confused.
"Ohhh!" he said, a hint of recognition in his voice. This is it! He realizes I am not who he thinks! "I thought you were your sister! You two look so much alike I can never tell!"
I nodded and smiled in agreement. What is wrong with this guy? The sister? Not only did he think I was someone else, he then thought I was someone else on top of being someone else! "Oh well!" I said and opened my hands in front of my like I was offering him something and shrugged my shoulders in a very it-happens-all-the-time sort of way.
I do happen to have a sister that people think I look just like and upon first meeting confuse us. She always gets upset, giving a look like, ew, I don’t look that much like her, do I? that I try not to get offended by.
Prom guy and I parted ways and I took my place in the crowd of waiting bus-goers. I could feel all their eyes on me, all silently wondering why I didn’t offer this apparent-friend more information about my twin sister’s night at the prom, not even giving so much as an "I’ll call you later," upon our departure.
But what else can you do in a city full of so many people that no one knows you enough to even know that you’re not someone else.
June 18, 2007
I've never been the gambling type.
"Do you ever play the lotto down in Manhattan?" Dad asks as we drive to the train station. It is a hot night in the suburbs which means it’s going to be an event hotter night in the city.
I never buy the lotto.
"You should really do it one day. Just a lucky number, birthday, anniversary..."
I suppose I should do it, one day. One day when I think that luck is on my side. One day just to pass the time. But I’ve always thought that you have to really believe in something in order to reap the benefits of it. Once you stop believing in the tooth fairy you stop getting a dollar under your pillow. If you don’t believe in true love you never seem to quite find it, and if you don’t believe in luck you’ll never strike it big.
"Just try it sometime. You never can tell."
People down on their luck are always believing in it more than they deep-down-know they should. Against all odds they put all their chips out on the table because they believe in that last almost tangible sliver of a chance that might turn their luck around. But luck is just what is caught up in the spinning axis of the universe that you can’t reach out and take control of. Luck is (unlike the lotto ticket) out of your hands. Numbers are just numbers. Birthday are just birthdays. Anniversaries are just anniversaries - and they mean something to you but they don’t mean anything to the automated machine that selects them at random.
We can’t control much, (tomorrow, you just don’t know), so we scratch those little boxes on those little pink tickets thinking we’re taking control of our lives. What would we do with all that money? What would we do first? We dream. We hope. We deep-down-know better.
Keep your luck to yourself, I say, your numbers, your birthdays, your anniversaries, and go about your daily chores in life - the hard living and working and loving (where teeth aren’t worth a thing) and pretend to yourself that every day is like your own personal lotto ticket. It may change how you think about luck. Just try it sometime. You never can tell.
I never buy the lotto.
"You should really do it one day. Just a lucky number, birthday, anniversary..."
I suppose I should do it, one day. One day when I think that luck is on my side. One day just to pass the time. But I’ve always thought that you have to really believe in something in order to reap the benefits of it. Once you stop believing in the tooth fairy you stop getting a dollar under your pillow. If you don’t believe in true love you never seem to quite find it, and if you don’t believe in luck you’ll never strike it big.
"Just try it sometime. You never can tell."
People down on their luck are always believing in it more than they deep-down-know they should. Against all odds they put all their chips out on the table because they believe in that last almost tangible sliver of a chance that might turn their luck around. But luck is just what is caught up in the spinning axis of the universe that you can’t reach out and take control of. Luck is (unlike the lotto ticket) out of your hands. Numbers are just numbers. Birthday are just birthdays. Anniversaries are just anniversaries - and they mean something to you but they don’t mean anything to the automated machine that selects them at random.
We can’t control much, (tomorrow, you just don’t know), so we scratch those little boxes on those little pink tickets thinking we’re taking control of our lives. What would we do with all that money? What would we do first? We dream. We hope. We deep-down-know better.
Keep your luck to yourself, I say, your numbers, your birthdays, your anniversaries, and go about your daily chores in life - the hard living and working and loving (where teeth aren’t worth a thing) and pretend to yourself that every day is like your own personal lotto ticket. It may change how you think about luck. Just try it sometime. You never can tell.
June 13, 2007
You've been here before.
It happens to me on occasion, where I’ve walked past the exact same apartment building that something was chasing me out of in my dream the night before. I look up for a minute at that front bay window and the greying black of the bricks and that same tree. Yes, that same exact tree was in my way last night, right there in the middle of my getaway as I ran in slow motion away from something that made so much more sense before I woke up with a start and thought "huh?" before I thought "ohhh," when I realized that nice thing you get to realize when bad things happen to you at night - it was just a dream.
The bad moments are when bad things happen and you’re stuck with that "huh?" moment for far longer than you’d like. You’ve been here before and it stinks worse than that pile of laundry in the corner you keep telling yourself you’ll bring to the laundromat tomorrow.
And then if you’re like me and you’ve come to a state in your mind where you’re starting to forget in the fog of your life what’s real and what’s not, you’ll find yourself staring at a person on the subway the way you do when you think you know them but aren’t confident enough to speak up, (forcing them to do what any normal person on the subway would do when someone is awkwardly staring at them - which is roll your eyes and turn away), and you think yourself: how do I know them?
There’s something about living in a city with so many people that if you find one person you know, if you happen to be in the same section of the same 1 train with this person, you have an obligation as a fellow lonely insignificant New Yorker to speak up, to make the connection of: "Oh yeah, you’re Mark, right? I met you at that bar on Rivington like a month ago. You’re friends with my friend Jessica?" And then it’s ohh’s and ahh’s all around as you can show everyone around you and prove to yourself that you’re making something of yourself in this place - you know people.
But if you’re like me, you know people, sure, but not a lot, and chances are that this person you’re staring at in the same section of the same 1 train isn’t anyone you’ve ever met before. Plus, you’re thinking to yourself, you’d probably really remember someone who is that cute. You just want to think that you know this person so that you have a reason to talk to them because everyone knows that no one in New York talks to anyone when they don’t have to.
And he’s cute, yes, and you haven’t been on a date since....and you think to yourself that if this guy just got to know you he’d never want to leave you. He’d realize how lucky he was, how much of a catch you really are. It’s because we all know how great we are, how much potential we have - but in a city full of so many people who don’t talk to each other, it’s very easy for no one to ever really get to know you at all.
That an it is also a little known fact among all New Yorkers that men of a certain age who are relatively attractive, put together and are wearing a tie that matches his dress shirt (tucked in), and is carrying some form of briefcase (ie: no backpack), and doesn’t have a ring on his finger - is gay.
So he gets off the train at 28th street and you laugh at yourself because you realize how ridiculous you’re becoming - you know very well you didn’t know him at all. Does it smell of desperation? Does it ooze loneliness? Or is it just this city taking it’s toll where all you need is to connect with someone else? Who knows. No one knows if their reality will ever catch up with their dreams.
And the subway carries on slow and steady and so you do because, (huh?), you think to yourself, you’ve been here before.
(Oh).
The bad moments are when bad things happen and you’re stuck with that "huh?" moment for far longer than you’d like. You’ve been here before and it stinks worse than that pile of laundry in the corner you keep telling yourself you’ll bring to the laundromat tomorrow.
And then if you’re like me and you’ve come to a state in your mind where you’re starting to forget in the fog of your life what’s real and what’s not, you’ll find yourself staring at a person on the subway the way you do when you think you know them but aren’t confident enough to speak up, (forcing them to do what any normal person on the subway would do when someone is awkwardly staring at them - which is roll your eyes and turn away), and you think yourself: how do I know them?
There’s something about living in a city with so many people that if you find one person you know, if you happen to be in the same section of the same 1 train with this person, you have an obligation as a fellow lonely insignificant New Yorker to speak up, to make the connection of: "Oh yeah, you’re Mark, right? I met you at that bar on Rivington like a month ago. You’re friends with my friend Jessica?" And then it’s ohh’s and ahh’s all around as you can show everyone around you and prove to yourself that you’re making something of yourself in this place - you know people.
But if you’re like me, you know people, sure, but not a lot, and chances are that this person you’re staring at in the same section of the same 1 train isn’t anyone you’ve ever met before. Plus, you’re thinking to yourself, you’d probably really remember someone who is that cute. You just want to think that you know this person so that you have a reason to talk to them because everyone knows that no one in New York talks to anyone when they don’t have to.
And he’s cute, yes, and you haven’t been on a date since....and you think to yourself that if this guy just got to know you he’d never want to leave you. He’d realize how lucky he was, how much of a catch you really are. It’s because we all know how great we are, how much potential we have - but in a city full of so many people who don’t talk to each other, it’s very easy for no one to ever really get to know you at all.
That an it is also a little known fact among all New Yorkers that men of a certain age who are relatively attractive, put together and are wearing a tie that matches his dress shirt (tucked in), and is carrying some form of briefcase (ie: no backpack), and doesn’t have a ring on his finger - is gay.
So he gets off the train at 28th street and you laugh at yourself because you realize how ridiculous you’re becoming - you know very well you didn’t know him at all. Does it smell of desperation? Does it ooze loneliness? Or is it just this city taking it’s toll where all you need is to connect with someone else? Who knows. No one knows if their reality will ever catch up with their dreams.
And the subway carries on slow and steady and so you do because, (huh?), you think to yourself, you’ve been here before.
(Oh).
June 10, 2007
You just never know.
The thing about knowing is that we always think we do. We always think we know more, know better, know enough to get ahead or get what we want, or just get by.
But as much as you know:
how frequently the subway comes
the number beer for you is one-too-many
what you look for in a boyfriend/girlfriend
why you came to new york
your favorite color
Just as easily, one day you:
find it derail and it never shows up.
drink more than you should
find someone who surprises you
realize that all your reasons have changed.
find that maybe green is the new black.
Because you can never know, and that's the scary part. You can never know from one day to the next what's going to happen to change everything in your life and make you walk to work, throw up on the sidewalk, or kiss someone you never thought would.
We like to think we're all smarter than we are, that we've been through so much we must have learned our lessons by now - but what can you know in a city with so many people about who you really are?
You just...Never. Know. when...what you know is always changing.
And in a city with so many people it's impossible to catch up - and you know more than you think (I think), if you let yourself know at least that.
But as much as you know:
how frequently the subway comes
the number beer for you is one-too-many
what you look for in a boyfriend/girlfriend
why you came to new york
your favorite color
Just as easily, one day you:
find it derail and it never shows up.
drink more than you should
find someone who surprises you
realize that all your reasons have changed.
find that maybe green is the new black.
Because you can never know, and that's the scary part. You can never know from one day to the next what's going to happen to change everything in your life and make you walk to work, throw up on the sidewalk, or kiss someone you never thought would.
We like to think we're all smarter than we are, that we've been through so much we must have learned our lessons by now - but what can you know in a city with so many people about who you really are?
You just...Never. Know. when...what you know is always changing.
And in a city with so many people it's impossible to catch up - and you know more than you think (I think), if you let yourself know at least that.
June 5, 2007
gait analysis.
I've taken to walking. Not that I don't walk a lot in this city, because long blocks are everywhere and endless avenues are far, and you have no choice but to hit the pavement to get from point anywhere to point somewhere. But I've taken to walking on an intentional level as a means to clear my head.
Too many nights that I get back from work, late, when the approaching summer heat is still lingering on the more but never entirely empty streets, and I feel trapped. It's easy, isn't it, how quicky you can drown in your own life?
The more tired I get, (ain't it always the way?) the less I can sleep. That's when the restlessness settles in and the walls shrink and I think that if I become just one more nameless face to one more person in this giant metropolis of people all wanting so much to mean something, I'm going to implode.
So that's why I've taken to walking, because being out on the streets is the only way to feel like you're a part of something you can never fully grasp - your existence in a place where everything is up, the buildings, the rent, the price of a beer, and financial plans, plans for the future and everything is up, up, up.
Not me. I like my feet settled firmly on the ground. Not up, but straight, on an even keel, balanced, planted step in front of planted step. That's why I've taken to walking, late at night when people are locked away in their expensive high-rise cages all waiting to go to sleep to dream about getting through tomorrow.
The less I can sleep the more tired I get, and so the further I walk. And long blocks and endless avenues go by like the past, and I think that if I become just one more nameless face to one more person in this giant metropolis of people all wanting so much to just mean something, I'll walk forever. I'll walk on forever with my feet settled firmly on the ground. No more lofty expectations, no more pipe dreams, no more unrealistic ideas or hopes or goals - no more...up. Just planted step in front of planted step, walking me straight and fast out a life that, (easy, isn't it?) can so quickly make me feel trapped.
Too many nights that I get back from work, late, when the approaching summer heat is still lingering on the more but never entirely empty streets, and I feel trapped. It's easy, isn't it, how quicky you can drown in your own life?
The more tired I get, (ain't it always the way?) the less I can sleep. That's when the restlessness settles in and the walls shrink and I think that if I become just one more nameless face to one more person in this giant metropolis of people all wanting so much to mean something, I'm going to implode.
So that's why I've taken to walking, because being out on the streets is the only way to feel like you're a part of something you can never fully grasp - your existence in a place where everything is up, the buildings, the rent, the price of a beer, and financial plans, plans for the future and everything is up, up, up.
Not me. I like my feet settled firmly on the ground. Not up, but straight, on an even keel, balanced, planted step in front of planted step. That's why I've taken to walking, late at night when people are locked away in their expensive high-rise cages all waiting to go to sleep to dream about getting through tomorrow.
The less I can sleep the more tired I get, and so the further I walk. And long blocks and endless avenues go by like the past, and I think that if I become just one more nameless face to one more person in this giant metropolis of people all wanting so much to just mean something, I'll walk forever. I'll walk on forever with my feet settled firmly on the ground. No more lofty expectations, no more pipe dreams, no more unrealistic ideas or hopes or goals - no more...up. Just planted step in front of planted step, walking me straight and fast out a life that, (easy, isn't it?) can so quickly make me feel trapped.
May 31, 2007
5°C (40°F)
There are things in life that we just don't want to address. There are truths that we know we have to come to terms with eventually, but tell ourselves we'll wait until later, wait until tomorrow, wait until we have more time.
Until, until, until.
It's like those mysterious tupperware containers in the back of my refrigerator. They've been there for a while, sitting and waiting in the back for me to reach in and take a chance on them. And I've been thinking about them, too, every time I open that refrigerator door and see their silhouettes slanted against the carton of milk, and the orange juice and the loaf of bread.
Each time I open the door the smell gets a little bit stronger, gets a little bit worse - but I tell myself that they're still good, that I shouldn't throw them away just yet.
So I wait. And day in and day out the door opens and shuts, the light goes on and off and there they are - just waiting for me to take a chance on them. I don't know why I keep waiting for later or tomorrow or until I have more time just to clean out the fridge. And now, because I didn't want to face the problem head on, it only got worse. I foolishly didn't deal with it right then and there when I knew the truth about how those mysterious containters of greening pasta and greying vegetables were never going to amount to much.
I could have easily just thrown it all away and started fresh. That's what I should have done. But we're accustomed to holding on to the smallest and most ordinary of things and making them feel like they're worth so much more. And it's all just a waste. All of it. Keeping things thermally insulated doesn't always protect them, making them numb doesn't always make them go away.
And it's not until, until, until you can barely breathe when you open the door do you realize that there are some truths in life you can only avoid for so long.
Until, until, until.
It's like those mysterious tupperware containers in the back of my refrigerator. They've been there for a while, sitting and waiting in the back for me to reach in and take a chance on them. And I've been thinking about them, too, every time I open that refrigerator door and see their silhouettes slanted against the carton of milk, and the orange juice and the loaf of bread.
Each time I open the door the smell gets a little bit stronger, gets a little bit worse - but I tell myself that they're still good, that I shouldn't throw them away just yet.
So I wait. And day in and day out the door opens and shuts, the light goes on and off and there they are - just waiting for me to take a chance on them. I don't know why I keep waiting for later or tomorrow or until I have more time just to clean out the fridge. And now, because I didn't want to face the problem head on, it only got worse. I foolishly didn't deal with it right then and there when I knew the truth about how those mysterious containters of greening pasta and greying vegetables were never going to amount to much.
I could have easily just thrown it all away and started fresh. That's what I should have done. But we're accustomed to holding on to the smallest and most ordinary of things and making them feel like they're worth so much more. And it's all just a waste. All of it. Keeping things thermally insulated doesn't always protect them, making them numb doesn't always make them go away.
And it's not until, until, until you can barely breathe when you open the door do you realize that there are some truths in life you can only avoid for so long.
May 29, 2007
Listen to the tap.
You're tapping your foot. Do you like this song?
Pardon?
Tapping. You're (gestures to my foot) tapping your foot. That usually means you like the song.
Oh (I look at my foot and make it stop). Yes.
So you like jazz?
(What is it about jazz that makes men think things they normally wouldn't?)
Yeah, I do.
That's interesting.
Right.
Do you even know what song is this?
(What is it about a girl liking jazz that always makes men want to quiz you?)
It's Dave Brubeck (easy one) Pick Up Sticks.
Nice.
(I could have said Miles Davis or Coltrane, or Ricky Martin and he wouldn't have known the difference).
Yes, it is.
(then):
What's your name/where are you from/how long have you been in the city/what do you do/do you have a boyfriend?
(I answer all questions honestly and there's only one answer he pays attention to).
How do you not have a boyfriend?
Because (I say), I've yet to meet anyone who actually listens.
Pardon?
Tapping. You're (gestures to my foot) tapping your foot. That usually means you like the song.
Oh (I look at my foot and make it stop). Yes.
So you like jazz?
(What is it about jazz that makes men think things they normally wouldn't?)
Yeah, I do.
That's interesting.
Right.
Do you even know what song is this?
(What is it about a girl liking jazz that always makes men want to quiz you?)
It's Dave Brubeck (easy one) Pick Up Sticks.
Nice.
(I could have said Miles Davis or Coltrane, or Ricky Martin and he wouldn't have known the difference).
Yes, it is.
(then):
What's your name/where are you from/how long have you been in the city/what do you do/do you have a boyfriend?
(I answer all questions honestly and there's only one answer he pays attention to).
How do you not have a boyfriend?
Because (I say), I've yet to meet anyone who actually listens.
May 23, 2007
You know things are bad when...
You walk 12 blocks to Best Buy twice in one day to bring your computer that has been plagued by Blue Screen Of Death for the past few weeks (first trip to assess, second to drop off with appropriate CDs you’re surprised you even had). You spend $100 on System Recovery (whatever that is). You spend $130 on a new hard drive (you don’t even know what those really do). You spend $100 on installation (because how can you install something you don’t understand)?
You wait two days, happily thinking you’ve done what you always do, which is throw money at the problem and get good results. After spending $330 you walk 12 blocks back to the store and get that look that people who know things about technology always give you when they know you don’t know as much as you probably should. You feel bad about yourself. You feel even worse when you mentally factor how you’re going to pay next month’s rent with this huge financial blow. But you smile anyway because at least, you think to yourself, you’ll have your computer back.
You walk 12 blocks home, rub your hands together after you turn on your computer the way you do when you’re really excited about something. You wait. You are excited. Then after mere moments, you see none other than the infamous Blue Screen that you’ve come to hate (while still not really understanding it).
While waiting for your eyes to remember how to blink you consider your options: throw computer out the window. Give up on technology entirely. Buy pens with whatever money you have left (about $5) and learn better how to write more legibly by hand.
Instead, you call your friend to complain to him about your problem, knowing full well that complaining has never fixed anything, but it sure does make you feel better. Then you listen as he laughs in disbelief and tells you that maybe, just maybe, some peoples lives (yours) are simply just meant to always be Blue Screens.
Note: You can buy a 10-pack of Bic’s for $4.75. Donations are welcome. Preferably in black.
You wait two days, happily thinking you’ve done what you always do, which is throw money at the problem and get good results. After spending $330 you walk 12 blocks back to the store and get that look that people who know things about technology always give you when they know you don’t know as much as you probably should. You feel bad about yourself. You feel even worse when you mentally factor how you’re going to pay next month’s rent with this huge financial blow. But you smile anyway because at least, you think to yourself, you’ll have your computer back.
You walk 12 blocks home, rub your hands together after you turn on your computer the way you do when you’re really excited about something. You wait. You are excited. Then after mere moments, you see none other than the infamous Blue Screen that you’ve come to hate (while still not really understanding it).
While waiting for your eyes to remember how to blink you consider your options: throw computer out the window. Give up on technology entirely. Buy pens with whatever money you have left (about $5) and learn better how to write more legibly by hand.
Instead, you call your friend to complain to him about your problem, knowing full well that complaining has never fixed anything, but it sure does make you feel better. Then you listen as he laughs in disbelief and tells you that maybe, just maybe, some peoples lives (yours) are simply just meant to always be Blue Screens.
Note: You can buy a 10-pack of Bic’s for $4.75. Donations are welcome. Preferably in black.
May 20, 2007
because you can't plan the weather.
Sometimes when you lose something you never thought you’d ever really lose, you begin to realize you’re losing more than just that – you begin to realize you’re losing things like: time, your mind, the reason why you get up in the morning and breathe in and breathe out.
And people in Manhattan with their maps on bright and sunny Saturdays lose themselves and start to feel that panic too, that loss of time and their minds Haven’t we already been on this corner? Have we just gone around in a circle? Because we like things out in the open where we can see them. We don’t like things to be lost: keys, chances, loves, afternoons, favorite t-shirts. We spend our days trying to find things, recapture them or claim them. Get, not lose. Acquire, not let go.
But bright and sunny Saturdays can just as quickly turn to dark and stormy ones. And then lost tourists have no choice but to ditch their maps and run, accept the loss, the socks that won’t dry for another few hours, and their inability now to have enough time to make it all the way uptown to see the Guggenheim.
Now they do only what the rest of us do who feel like we’re losing things like time and our minds and the reason why we get up in the morning – simply take shelter and wait for the storm to subside.
And people in Manhattan with their maps on bright and sunny Saturdays lose themselves and start to feel that panic too, that loss of time and their minds Haven’t we already been on this corner? Have we just gone around in a circle? Because we like things out in the open where we can see them. We don’t like things to be lost: keys, chances, loves, afternoons, favorite t-shirts. We spend our days trying to find things, recapture them or claim them. Get, not lose. Acquire, not let go.
But bright and sunny Saturdays can just as quickly turn to dark and stormy ones. And then lost tourists have no choice but to ditch their maps and run, accept the loss, the socks that won’t dry for another few hours, and their inability now to have enough time to make it all the way uptown to see the Guggenheim.
Now they do only what the rest of us do who feel like we’re losing things like time and our minds and the reason why we get up in the morning – simply take shelter and wait for the storm to subside.
May 18, 2007
dysfunctional.
Someone sent this to me today.
I don’t know if I should be offended, or just take comfort in the fact that all of my friends have simply come to terms with the fact that I may never be in (or find) a successful relationship.
And it’s not me. It’s only me when it’s you. And it’s always you.
I don’t know if I should be offended, or just take comfort in the fact that all of my friends have simply come to terms with the fact that I may never be in (or find) a successful relationship.
And it’s not me. It’s only me when it’s you. And it’s always you.
May 16, 2007
lend a hand?
I never pay any attention to what’s going on. People who come to New York to visit always complain that New Yorkers don’t care about other people. They say that New Yorkers are mean spirited, they avoid you and just shake their heads impolitely when their group of tourists with maps and fanny packs, all standing in the middle of the sidewalk like no one else in the world exists, extend their arms an open their mouths with that we know is going to be a question of “Where am I?”
In our minds we say: You are already here. Just walk.
And it’s not that we’re rude or impolite, it’s just that in a city with so many people we covet those sacred moments when we get to be alone. When we can walk free and unobstructed (mostly) and clear our heads, out of the elevators and subways and busy offices that we’re crammed into all day long. And yes, of course we know how to get to Rockefeller Center from 70th and Park, but we’re not going to tell you how because you have a map(s), and even without a map(s), to us this city is the easiest place to navigate in the world, and you should, by all means, be able to just walk, and figure it out.
Sometimes, however, we have no choice but to stop and recognize the fact that no matter what we do we’re not alone here (or anywhere, really). On the 1 express train this morning I wasn’t paying attention, seriously reading The New Yorker, (funnily enough American Chronicles with Janet Lepore’s The Meaning of Life), when the woman standing next to me started yelling into the little speaker on the wall near the door which is marked in black and red: EMERGENCY BUTTON.
“HELLO? THIS IS…This is car number 6061 and we’ve got….we’ve got a MAN down near the doors laying on the ground….and people are trying to MOVE him and he’s NOT MOVING. Car 6061. There’s A MAN ON THE FLOOR and he’s NOT MOVING. WE NEED HELP.”
I have to admit, regrettably, that I first looked at her with a look of hateful irritation. Here we go, I thought. Another crazy person on my train, going to start yelling random things that don’t make sense. And it’s always my car. Why does it always have to be the car that I’m in that gets the crazy people? Of all the subway cars on all the lines in all the city…
Of course then I looked away from her, peered to my right, and saw it. What I saw at first as the crowd parted and people began muttering to themselves, was simply, a hand. Just a hand. There it was limp on the floor, palm face-up. Someone was attached to that hand but I couldn’t see them. They were on the floor tucked under the seat, blocked by people standing with spring coats and big shopping bags (at 8:30 AM?).
No one seemed to care. No one seemed phased. The one big thing we all seemed to manage was simply to look. We all just looked. The train stopped at 14th street and the subway conductor called for a doctor. As I left the train (to switch to the local) I saw the body attached to the hand on the ground - eyes closed, blue fleece jacket, light brown hair. He was someone.
To us we’re all just anybody. Could be anybody, we all thought. What can we really do about just anybody? People all around him were still. And my heart sank. I watched as they all just went back to their newspapers, silently upset that their few morning moments of peace and quiet on the subway were lost just because of somebody else’s someone.
In our minds we say: You are already here. Just walk.
And it’s not that we’re rude or impolite, it’s just that in a city with so many people we covet those sacred moments when we get to be alone. When we can walk free and unobstructed (mostly) and clear our heads, out of the elevators and subways and busy offices that we’re crammed into all day long. And yes, of course we know how to get to Rockefeller Center from 70th and Park, but we’re not going to tell you how because you have a map(s), and even without a map(s), to us this city is the easiest place to navigate in the world, and you should, by all means, be able to just walk, and figure it out.
Sometimes, however, we have no choice but to stop and recognize the fact that no matter what we do we’re not alone here (or anywhere, really). On the 1 express train this morning I wasn’t paying attention, seriously reading The New Yorker, (funnily enough American Chronicles with Janet Lepore’s The Meaning of Life), when the woman standing next to me started yelling into the little speaker on the wall near the door which is marked in black and red: EMERGENCY BUTTON.
“HELLO? THIS IS…This is car number 6061 and we’ve got….we’ve got a MAN down near the doors laying on the ground….and people are trying to MOVE him and he’s NOT MOVING. Car 6061. There’s A MAN ON THE FLOOR and he’s NOT MOVING. WE NEED HELP.”
I have to admit, regrettably, that I first looked at her with a look of hateful irritation. Here we go, I thought. Another crazy person on my train, going to start yelling random things that don’t make sense. And it’s always my car. Why does it always have to be the car that I’m in that gets the crazy people? Of all the subway cars on all the lines in all the city…
Of course then I looked away from her, peered to my right, and saw it. What I saw at first as the crowd parted and people began muttering to themselves, was simply, a hand. Just a hand. There it was limp on the floor, palm face-up. Someone was attached to that hand but I couldn’t see them. They were on the floor tucked under the seat, blocked by people standing with spring coats and big shopping bags (at 8:30 AM?).
No one seemed to care. No one seemed phased. The one big thing we all seemed to manage was simply to look. We all just looked. The train stopped at 14th street and the subway conductor called for a doctor. As I left the train (to switch to the local) I saw the body attached to the hand on the ground - eyes closed, blue fleece jacket, light brown hair. He was someone.
To us we’re all just anybody. Could be anybody, we all thought. What can we really do about just anybody? People all around him were still. And my heart sank. I watched as they all just went back to their newspapers, silently upset that their few morning moments of peace and quiet on the subway were lost just because of somebody else’s someone.
May 7, 2007
All ignorance toboggans into know.
What is funny is that you can be afraid of things no matter how old you get. You think you’d grow out of it, out of something as silly as being afraid. Because being scared of something seems to be directly associated in our brains to our childhoods – being afraid of the dark, of the next door neighbor’s German Shepard who at the time was relatively the same size as you, of clowns, of being alone, of getting yelled at for spilled ice cream on shirts, for getting a bad grade on a spelling test, or breaking that glass vase that’s been in the family for generations.
What’s funny is that when you get older it’s not that you’re no longer scared, you’re just scared of different things – scared of how you’ll look in the morning when it’s no longer dark, of the next door neighbor’s wrath after you accidentally ran over their German Shepard with your car, of clowns (still), of being alone (forever), of getting yelled at for doing your job wrong, getting fired, then not having enough money to pay the rent.
I left Manhattan for a few days on a plane and I remembered the first time I flew when I was in the first grade. I remembered that I loved to fly. I loved everything about it. How fast the wheels turned before take-off, the ascent into the clouds, the rumble of turbulence, the screeching jolt of the landing. I sat on my knees in the window seat and peered out in what now resonates only as embarrassingly naïve fascination.
Now, trapped between a portly fellow asleep and taking over more than his fair share of arm space, and a girl about eighteen with her quilted Chanel handbag ($1,995), crying before take-off through her pink phone to presumably a friend about how “totally not upset Sean was” about her leaving, and how he “is trying to act all like, mature like, you know, blah blah, like ‘call me when you land,’ or whatever. And I just want to be like, God! Just like be a teenager ya know? We’re not married”) – I started to feel the fear.
What if this is it? What if something happens and the wheels don’t turn fast enough before take-off and the ascent into the clouds is rocky and the rumble of the turbulence takes us out of the air before we can even think about the loud screeching jolt of the landing? And how could I not be afraid when my last image would be of Chanel Handbag applying a full (and might I add, excessive) makeup routine mid-flight lasting over a half hour after waxing sentimental about her future with Sean?
But everything, of course, was fine. My fear faded and we landed. Portly Man woke up and moved his arm so that I could actually sit back in my seat, and Chanel Handbag thanked me (though who am I really to be giving relationship advice?) and complimented me on my own bag, which I neglected to tell her cost me $10 on Broadway and Spring.
Planes and life up you, and up the stakes, and the older you get the more realize that you don’t outgrow being afraid like you did that favorite pair of pajamas with feet (in yellow). We are afraid of flying, of regrets, of missing out on the important things in life, like designer handbags and loving Sean and it just becomes a part of who we are, and we learn (hopefully) to deal with it, (mostly), because aisle, window seat or center, sometimes you just don’t have a choice.
What’s funny is that when you get older it’s not that you’re no longer scared, you’re just scared of different things – scared of how you’ll look in the morning when it’s no longer dark, of the next door neighbor’s wrath after you accidentally ran over their German Shepard with your car, of clowns (still), of being alone (forever), of getting yelled at for doing your job wrong, getting fired, then not having enough money to pay the rent.
I left Manhattan for a few days on a plane and I remembered the first time I flew when I was in the first grade. I remembered that I loved to fly. I loved everything about it. How fast the wheels turned before take-off, the ascent into the clouds, the rumble of turbulence, the screeching jolt of the landing. I sat on my knees in the window seat and peered out in what now resonates only as embarrassingly naïve fascination.
Now, trapped between a portly fellow asleep and taking over more than his fair share of arm space, and a girl about eighteen with her quilted Chanel handbag ($1,995), crying before take-off through her pink phone to presumably a friend about how “totally not upset Sean was” about her leaving, and how he “is trying to act all like, mature like, you know, blah blah, like ‘call me when you land,’ or whatever. And I just want to be like, God! Just like be a teenager ya know? We’re not married”) – I started to feel the fear.
What if this is it? What if something happens and the wheels don’t turn fast enough before take-off and the ascent into the clouds is rocky and the rumble of the turbulence takes us out of the air before we can even think about the loud screeching jolt of the landing? And how could I not be afraid when my last image would be of Chanel Handbag applying a full (and might I add, excessive) makeup routine mid-flight lasting over a half hour after waxing sentimental about her future with Sean?
But everything, of course, was fine. My fear faded and we landed. Portly Man woke up and moved his arm so that I could actually sit back in my seat, and Chanel Handbag thanked me (though who am I really to be giving relationship advice?) and complimented me on my own bag, which I neglected to tell her cost me $10 on Broadway and Spring.
Planes and life up you, and up the stakes, and the older you get the more realize that you don’t outgrow being afraid like you did that favorite pair of pajamas with feet (in yellow). We are afraid of flying, of regrets, of missing out on the important things in life, like designer handbags and loving Sean and it just becomes a part of who we are, and we learn (hopefully) to deal with it, (mostly), because aisle, window seat or center, sometimes you just don’t have a choice.
May 2, 2007
Might can could, possibly will.
We are all looking for something. The search is what keeps us going. We keep waking up every morning because how can we not? We think: this is it. This could be the day when we find It. This could be the day when all of our searching ends. It is this hopeful disillusion that subconsciously makes us smile as we drink our morning coffee, push through the crowds to work and then through the crowds on the way home.
True, sometimes we can’t help but look out at that person walking their dog or sitting on a bench along the park reading the Times as we pass them, frazzled and late to the office, and wonder, bitterly: don’t they have a job? Don’t they have somewhere to be? That must be nice, we huff, to have all that free time. But then we realize – they must have already found It.
Lucky them.
So we smile subconsciously, at the thought of our own personal searches, as the bus speeds us unsteadily across town, entirely unaware of two facts. One: that we may never really find what it is that we’re looking for. And two, (and this one is much more worrying than the first), we very well already have found it, but we’re just too stupid, too foolishly looking forward to what could be, to recognize what already is.
Luck will break your heart.
True, sometimes we can’t help but look out at that person walking their dog or sitting on a bench along the park reading the Times as we pass them, frazzled and late to the office, and wonder, bitterly: don’t they have a job? Don’t they have somewhere to be? That must be nice, we huff, to have all that free time. But then we realize – they must have already found It.
Lucky them.
So we smile subconsciously, at the thought of our own personal searches, as the bus speeds us unsteadily across town, entirely unaware of two facts. One: that we may never really find what it is that we’re looking for. And two, (and this one is much more worrying than the first), we very well already have found it, but we’re just too stupid, too foolishly looking forward to what could be, to recognize what already is.
Luck will break your heart.
April 29, 2007
Trouble.
It’s times like these, (Sunday nights when you realize you have to go back to your real life that you’ve just been spending the last two days trying to escape), that you think you can’t be bothered.
You can’t be troubled with things like:
The laundry
The dishes
Not meeting anyone
Meeting all the wrong ones
Drinking too much
Missing the train
Being late to work
That light bulb you’ve been meaning to change.
You can’t be bothered with these things anymore when all you can think about are the massive moments in life that you can’t do anything about.
It’s times like these (with the dishes in the sink and the lights still out), that you think about how you try to say out of it, how you’re told to keep away, to avoid at all costs – trouble.
But trouble is like a rain storm, even when you bring an umbrella (and are prepared enough to have brought one), it still gets you.
You can’t be troubled with things like:
The laundry
The dishes
Not meeting anyone
Meeting all the wrong ones
Drinking too much
Missing the train
Being late to work
That light bulb you’ve been meaning to change.
You can’t be bothered with these things anymore when all you can think about are the massive moments in life that you can’t do anything about.
It’s times like these (with the dishes in the sink and the lights still out), that you think about how you try to say out of it, how you’re told to keep away, to avoid at all costs – trouble.
But trouble is like a rain storm, even when you bring an umbrella (and are prepared enough to have brought one), it still gets you.
April 25, 2007
You know things are bad when…
On your desk you have the following:
1 empty (grande) Starbucks coffee (from 8:30AM) with The Way I See It #210 (Raymond Lawson “People should get out of their comfort zones on a daily basis. Take up knitting and boxing. It will make you so much more interesting”).
2 (empty) cans of diet coke.
1 empty (tall) Starbucks coffee (from 1PM) with The Way I See It # 195 (Helen Thomas “Always question the powers that be”).
And you realize:
You’re officially a year older.
It’s only 3:30.
And you have no idea how to knit.
1 empty (grande) Starbucks coffee (from 8:30AM) with The Way I See It #210 (Raymond Lawson “People should get out of their comfort zones on a daily basis. Take up knitting and boxing. It will make you so much more interesting”).
2 (empty) cans of diet coke.
1 empty (tall) Starbucks coffee (from 1PM) with The Way I See It # 195 (Helen Thomas “Always question the powers that be”).
And you realize:
You’re officially a year older.
It’s only 3:30.
And you have no idea how to knit.
April 24, 2007
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
Now that the weather is nice, people are making plans. Of course they don’t realize that this 80 degree streak isn’t going to last for the entirety of April and May. This will change soon, and it will get a little colder before Real Summer settles in for only about one month before it leaves the screen door as quickly as it came in. How easily people forget.
Regardless, they’re excited and talking about how now with the onset of sun and warmth they would like to leave the city to actually enjoy it. No one is ever satisfied. OK, so maybe when it’s hot in the city it can be a little disgusting, what with the millions of people all outside on the same sidewalks at once, sweating, complaining, walking slow (tourists), sweating, making the lines longer at the places you need to go, you know, like Starbucks.
But you have to embrace these people by just accepting and ignoring them. Accept the lines and ignore the slow walkers like you do that guy on the subway (who always seems to end up right next to me while I’m trying to read) who speaks loudly about finding Jesus and how we’re all sinners.
Everyone is dreamer of greener pastures (I think Central Park is just fine). Suddenly all my friends are talking about driving two hours to go camping, to get away from the pavement because apparently the sun is different there. I mean, I guess. I’ve never understood camping, probably because once you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all, and I hate bugs. There are few insects that I can really hang with (I know, I know, I’m such a girl), and those include the standard cute bugs like lady bugs and fireflies, both of which you can find in the Park.
Real Summer isn’t even here yet anyway. This is Fake Summer, also known as Spring, and I don’t think us city-dwellers need to go far to enjoy it. It’s supposed to rain this weekend anyway, and the temperature is slated to drop about thirty degrees. I think that’s going to be about the time all those campers are going to wish they weren’t so quick to quit the city, and had simply stayed here.
Regardless, they’re excited and talking about how now with the onset of sun and warmth they would like to leave the city to actually enjoy it. No one is ever satisfied. OK, so maybe when it’s hot in the city it can be a little disgusting, what with the millions of people all outside on the same sidewalks at once, sweating, complaining, walking slow (tourists), sweating, making the lines longer at the places you need to go, you know, like Starbucks.
But you have to embrace these people by just accepting and ignoring them. Accept the lines and ignore the slow walkers like you do that guy on the subway (who always seems to end up right next to me while I’m trying to read) who speaks loudly about finding Jesus and how we’re all sinners.
Everyone is dreamer of greener pastures (I think Central Park is just fine). Suddenly all my friends are talking about driving two hours to go camping, to get away from the pavement because apparently the sun is different there. I mean, I guess. I’ve never understood camping, probably because once you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all, and I hate bugs. There are few insects that I can really hang with (I know, I know, I’m such a girl), and those include the standard cute bugs like lady bugs and fireflies, both of which you can find in the Park.
Real Summer isn’t even here yet anyway. This is Fake Summer, also known as Spring, and I don’t think us city-dwellers need to go far to enjoy it. It’s supposed to rain this weekend anyway, and the temperature is slated to drop about thirty degrees. I think that’s going to be about the time all those campers are going to wish they weren’t so quick to quit the city, and had simply stayed here.
April 17, 2007
We gauge our lives by years.
I have a birthday tomorrow, and I have to admit I’ve never entirely understood celebrating birthdays. Maybe at one point they made sense, but all they make me feel now is nostalgic for the past, the way things used to be when birthdays were when I invited literally everyone from my grade school class, (even the kids I never talked to), and wore a party dress with a big bow and ate cake with pastel icing on it and played silly games like pin the tail on the donkey, and duck duck goose and that one where you try to drop as many clothes pins into a small jar as possible (personal record: 8).
And everyone brought a present. That’s when presents weren’t clothes but things you really needed – you know, toys. Birthdays were the only time during the year except Christmas where you could stock up on the essentials: Barbies, more Rubik’s cubes you swore you’d one day figure out, board games, fake food for your thriving four star restaurant in the basement, and the latest Disney movie on VHS to add to your collection.
Now it’s just a day where I can see how much everything has changed, (without cake or Barbie’s). A day that reminds me of all the things I haven’t done that I said I’d do by now. Birthday’s for grown-ups is really just one big kick in the face, a whole day dedicated to you to remind you just how much time you’ve actually been wasting.
I know that sounds cynical, but I’m a realist, and any good realist will tell you that birthday’s are complete crap. They’re the holiday equivalent of New Years. Why are we celebrating the passage of time? Shouldn’t we be sad to see it come and go? Another day? Another year? Another 365 days that you hardly feel were your own life at all?
And yet they’ve happened to you regardless. We gauge our lives by years but it seems to me we should gauge them by hours and minutes. That’s when the real stuff happens, the real dirt of life, the real messiness, the real living. I know we can’t celebrate ourselves every second of every day, but we should remember more that it’s not just our age that we should weigh ourselves by, rather, just how we get through every day.
Birthdays aren’t what they used to be because life isn’t the way it used to be either. It’s messy and real and fragile and it’s in those seconds you never think about that it happens. It comes at you fast, before you even have a chance to blow out the candles and wish that it didn’t.
And everyone brought a present. That’s when presents weren’t clothes but things you really needed – you know, toys. Birthdays were the only time during the year except Christmas where you could stock up on the essentials: Barbies, more Rubik’s cubes you swore you’d one day figure out, board games, fake food for your thriving four star restaurant in the basement, and the latest Disney movie on VHS to add to your collection.
Now it’s just a day where I can see how much everything has changed, (without cake or Barbie’s). A day that reminds me of all the things I haven’t done that I said I’d do by now. Birthday’s for grown-ups is really just one big kick in the face, a whole day dedicated to you to remind you just how much time you’ve actually been wasting.
I know that sounds cynical, but I’m a realist, and any good realist will tell you that birthday’s are complete crap. They’re the holiday equivalent of New Years. Why are we celebrating the passage of time? Shouldn’t we be sad to see it come and go? Another day? Another year? Another 365 days that you hardly feel were your own life at all?
And yet they’ve happened to you regardless. We gauge our lives by years but it seems to me we should gauge them by hours and minutes. That’s when the real stuff happens, the real dirt of life, the real messiness, the real living. I know we can’t celebrate ourselves every second of every day, but we should remember more that it’s not just our age that we should weigh ourselves by, rather, just how we get through every day.
Birthdays aren’t what they used to be because life isn’t the way it used to be either. It’s messy and real and fragile and it’s in those seconds you never think about that it happens. It comes at you fast, before you even have a chance to blow out the candles and wish that it didn’t.
April 12, 2007
You know things are bad when…
The person you went on a date with last week,
You suddenly see in the New York Times Style Section —
With a nice photo of him and his wife.
Whom he just married.
Two day ago.
You suddenly see in the New York Times Style Section —
With a nice photo of him and his wife.
Whom he just married.
Two day ago.
April 9, 2007
Vehicle for hire.
Why is it that in New York, at the exact moment you find yourself needing something you feel like you can’t get it?
Like, say, a cab?
(holding luggage, alone, 35th street, late at night, tired, cold)
You can’t find one. Or they’re all, lights out. And then you can see it in your head like a movie of your life going in fast forward, all those times you, standing on street corners looking at cabs you don’t need and you’ve never once seen so many with lights out. Not once.
And suddenly you hear yourself say, arm outstretched with your best finger-pointing-to-the-sky cab hailing move, out loud to no one in particular: Unbelievable. Is there like a cab shortage in the city all of a sudden? Have we run out of cabs? You’ve got to be kidding me.
And then the guy on the corner with the trendy glasses who heard you, (who you know always gets what he wants at the exact moment he wants it), looks at you with his best oh you poor unlucky girl smile, and shakes his head, and you realize, that you’ve become that New Yorker.
It was only a matter of time, anyway.
Like, say, a cab?
(holding luggage, alone, 35th street, late at night, tired, cold)
You can’t find one. Or they’re all, lights out. And then you can see it in your head like a movie of your life going in fast forward, all those times you, standing on street corners looking at cabs you don’t need and you’ve never once seen so many with lights out. Not once.
And suddenly you hear yourself say, arm outstretched with your best finger-pointing-to-the-sky cab hailing move, out loud to no one in particular: Unbelievable. Is there like a cab shortage in the city all of a sudden? Have we run out of cabs? You’ve got to be kidding me.
And then the guy on the corner with the trendy glasses who heard you, (who you know always gets what he wants at the exact moment he wants it), looks at you with his best oh you poor unlucky girl smile, and shakes his head, and you realize, that you’ve become that New Yorker.
It was only a matter of time, anyway.
April 4, 2007
Write it again, Sam.
When I think Marlene Dietrich all I can think of is her deep seducing voice singing “Falling in Love Again,” about how she never wanted to, but couldn’t help it. It’s so noir, so 1930’s, so in-your-face-femme that it makes me want to cut my hair and iron it into nice, short, un-moveable waves and dye it blonde.
When I think of Ernest Hemingway I think of lots of polydactyl cats hanging around Key West and how much I hated reading A Farewell to Arms in my Major Figure: Hemingway class in college. The book was too dramatic, too ridiculous, too frustrating in how long it took Henry and Catherine to get it together (and by “it” I mean them). I know, I know, love in the time of war can’t be easy, nursing jaundice and fighting Germans and then going AWOL and whatnot. Still, it’s a good thing I kept reading Hemingway long after my annoyance with those two faded away, because he came to be one of my favorite writers of all time (please see The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time).
Anyway, I know Ernest was a bit of a womanizer and never really knew what he wanted - however these letters have aided in brightening my overall already glowing opinion of him. All writers struggle with how to deal with the outside world because they don’t entirely know how to interact with other people. They aren’t good at voicing how they feel because they’re so used to (and are more comfortable with) keeping the world inside their heads. Intrinsically they are better off on their own, so I’m not surprised in a way, that Ernest spent a lot of his time isolated in the woods of Northern Michigan, was married four times and committed suicide at the age of 61. (Ok, so maybe I’m a little surprised - insanity did, after all, run in his family).
In 30 letters to Marlene from 1949 to 1959 (now a complete addition to the 31 she sent to him) Hemingway confesses his admiration for her in what experts have come to conclude as an entirely non-physical relationship: “What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel.” I guess that’s one of the great things about having a writer fall in love with you – they can express it with more eloquence than most.
However, what I love most about this finding is that they were victims of un-synchronized passion. That even the irritating Henry and Catherine found the right timing, but Hemingway himself could not. Those times when he was out of love, she was deep in some romantic tribulation, and “on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvelously seeking eyes, I was submerged.”
What is it about timing that left these two sending ridiculously romantic letters to each other for at least ten years? Dietrich began a 1951 letter, “I think it is high time to tell you that I think of you constantly. I read your letters over and over and speak of you with a few chosen men. I have moved your photograph to my bedroom and mostly look at it rather helplessly.”
This whole finding has made me hate the fact the letter writing is a long lost art form. There’s something about email that doesn’t quite capture the personal quality that comes through with letters. Granted, some people (like myself) have horrible handwriting. For a long time I’d always longed to have those nice, bubbly, perfectly round letters that are directly associate with “girl” handwriting (though I found it highly offensive when they would dot their “I’s” with hearts), however I’ve come to accept my doctor-like scratch. And regardless, handwriting is a part of who you are, barely legible or not, and there’s something so open and raw about that. Writing by hand takes time, takes more thought and means more to the reader knowing that someone took the time to find a pen and paper and didn’t just push keys on a keyboard.
While I’ve never received a love letter, and don’t know that anyone in my generation ever actually has, I have to admit that I was reading their correspondence with one hand over my mouth in rapt-near-silence unlike I ever did while turning the pages of Farewell. Maybe that’s because sometimes just plain life is somehow always more interesting than what you’ll ever find in a book, no matter who writes it.
When I think of Ernest Hemingway I think of lots of polydactyl cats hanging around Key West and how much I hated reading A Farewell to Arms in my Major Figure: Hemingway class in college. The book was too dramatic, too ridiculous, too frustrating in how long it took Henry and Catherine to get it together (and by “it” I mean them). I know, I know, love in the time of war can’t be easy, nursing jaundice and fighting Germans and then going AWOL and whatnot. Still, it’s a good thing I kept reading Hemingway long after my annoyance with those two faded away, because he came to be one of my favorite writers of all time (please see The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time).
Anyway, I know Ernest was a bit of a womanizer and never really knew what he wanted - however these letters have aided in brightening my overall already glowing opinion of him. All writers struggle with how to deal with the outside world because they don’t entirely know how to interact with other people. They aren’t good at voicing how they feel because they’re so used to (and are more comfortable with) keeping the world inside their heads. Intrinsically they are better off on their own, so I’m not surprised in a way, that Ernest spent a lot of his time isolated in the woods of Northern Michigan, was married four times and committed suicide at the age of 61. (Ok, so maybe I’m a little surprised - insanity did, after all, run in his family).
In 30 letters to Marlene from 1949 to 1959 (now a complete addition to the 31 she sent to him) Hemingway confesses his admiration for her in what experts have come to conclude as an entirely non-physical relationship: “What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel.” I guess that’s one of the great things about having a writer fall in love with you – they can express it with more eloquence than most.
However, what I love most about this finding is that they were victims of un-synchronized passion. That even the irritating Henry and Catherine found the right timing, but Hemingway himself could not. Those times when he was out of love, she was deep in some romantic tribulation, and “on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvelously seeking eyes, I was submerged.”
What is it about timing that left these two sending ridiculously romantic letters to each other for at least ten years? Dietrich began a 1951 letter, “I think it is high time to tell you that I think of you constantly. I read your letters over and over and speak of you with a few chosen men. I have moved your photograph to my bedroom and mostly look at it rather helplessly.”
This whole finding has made me hate the fact the letter writing is a long lost art form. There’s something about email that doesn’t quite capture the personal quality that comes through with letters. Granted, some people (like myself) have horrible handwriting. For a long time I’d always longed to have those nice, bubbly, perfectly round letters that are directly associate with “girl” handwriting (though I found it highly offensive when they would dot their “I’s” with hearts), however I’ve come to accept my doctor-like scratch. And regardless, handwriting is a part of who you are, barely legible or not, and there’s something so open and raw about that. Writing by hand takes time, takes more thought and means more to the reader knowing that someone took the time to find a pen and paper and didn’t just push keys on a keyboard.
While I’ve never received a love letter, and don’t know that anyone in my generation ever actually has, I have to admit that I was reading their correspondence with one hand over my mouth in rapt-near-silence unlike I ever did while turning the pages of Farewell. Maybe that’s because sometimes just plain life is somehow always more interesting than what you’ll ever find in a book, no matter who writes it.
March 29, 2007
The Four Fundamentals
So I’m a single coffeeholic and I’m okay with that. I’ve yet to find someone who appreciates me for who I am – an addicted, eccentric, twenty-something New Yorker who won’t settle for a man the same way she won’t settle for her coffee. However during this rather long (almost lifetime long, really) bout of singledom, I’ve found a companion in my provider.
Starbucks has been good to me lately – and this newly featured Guatemala Casi Cielo is like the dark brooding man you try to force a moment with (read: stare at) on the subway but would never actually talk to. It’s described as “elegant and intriguing,” and is more approachable (however perhaps a little less formally attired) than the dark brooding man.
Starbucks has an uncanny ability of making their coffees sound just like the kinds of people you might be interested in going on a date with. I mean, who wouldn’t want elegant and intriguing? Or “intense and earthy” (Sumatra)? “light and lively” (house blend)? or even “mellow and well-rounded” (Yukon)?
And while I’d like to find myself a good Gold Coast blend (“rich and sophisticated”), you can never really be too sure what blend is best for you. People are as complex as the beans, and just as there are fundamentals to finding relationship happiness, there are guidelines for finding the perfect cup.
The four fundamentals of coffee are as follows: proportion, grind, water and freshness. Without these you find yourself not only not enjoying your coffee, but feeling let down, disappointed because you’ve unknowingly (or knowingly for reasons of availability, convenience, etc.) settled for “dull and bland.”
Ostensibly, the amount of time the coffee and water spend together affects the flavor elements that end up in your cup, and unless and until you find a blend that is at the right place at the right time, I’m afraid it just might not be in the cards. But filter machines brew for much longer and with more water, making a weaker (albeit good) coffee. It’s the kind of coffee that’s been in your pantry for months. Diluted you say, “it’s fine,” because you just don’t want to bother going out and getting something new. On the other hand, a French press, for example, where the water and grinds have had less time in overall direct contact, however the outcome is a lot stronger and more intense.
In the end, of course, it’s the blending that matters most. What is ultimately needed is the right combination of various qualities found in different regions to form one harmonious, balanced whole. No wonder I’m still single.
Whatever the case, each Starbucks blend offers a cup of coffee that no single-origin coffee can duplicate. Because really, who wants ordinary anyway? Why settle when there’s just so much out there to choose from? When you’ve yet to really find your perfect cut? OK, so maybe I’m getting a little carried away seeing as how a good coffee is a little easier to find in this city than a good man (sadly). And at, what is it now? Like $10 a cup? Some of you average-cuppa-Joe’s out there may think I’m out of my mind to be dedicating so much time to my morning, afternoon, and sometimes nightly indulgence in roasted beans.
I figure that while it may take more effort and time to reach such a seemingly perfect outcome in anything in life, to me, a coffeeholic of the second largest city in the world next to Tokyo (right?), it’s just like what The Way I See It #157 says: “Some of the best inventive moments were born out of ‘wrong thinking.’ Most people start with the right way so they all follow the same path. The wrong way will lead to mistakes from which you can learn and create new discoveries – the kind of original ideas that come to life when we dare to be different, keep an open mind and have no fear of failure.”
James Dyson said that. And all he did was design a better way to pick up dirt.
Starbucks has been good to me lately – and this newly featured Guatemala Casi Cielo is like the dark brooding man you try to force a moment with (read: stare at) on the subway but would never actually talk to. It’s described as “elegant and intriguing,” and is more approachable (however perhaps a little less formally attired) than the dark brooding man.
Starbucks has an uncanny ability of making their coffees sound just like the kinds of people you might be interested in going on a date with. I mean, who wouldn’t want elegant and intriguing? Or “intense and earthy” (Sumatra)? “light and lively” (house blend)? or even “mellow and well-rounded” (Yukon)?
And while I’d like to find myself a good Gold Coast blend (“rich and sophisticated”), you can never really be too sure what blend is best for you. People are as complex as the beans, and just as there are fundamentals to finding relationship happiness, there are guidelines for finding the perfect cup.
The four fundamentals of coffee are as follows: proportion, grind, water and freshness. Without these you find yourself not only not enjoying your coffee, but feeling let down, disappointed because you’ve unknowingly (or knowingly for reasons of availability, convenience, etc.) settled for “dull and bland.”
Ostensibly, the amount of time the coffee and water spend together affects the flavor elements that end up in your cup, and unless and until you find a blend that is at the right place at the right time, I’m afraid it just might not be in the cards. But filter machines brew for much longer and with more water, making a weaker (albeit good) coffee. It’s the kind of coffee that’s been in your pantry for months. Diluted you say, “it’s fine,” because you just don’t want to bother going out and getting something new. On the other hand, a French press, for example, where the water and grinds have had less time in overall direct contact, however the outcome is a lot stronger and more intense.
In the end, of course, it’s the blending that matters most. What is ultimately needed is the right combination of various qualities found in different regions to form one harmonious, balanced whole. No wonder I’m still single.
Whatever the case, each Starbucks blend offers a cup of coffee that no single-origin coffee can duplicate. Because really, who wants ordinary anyway? Why settle when there’s just so much out there to choose from? When you’ve yet to really find your perfect cut? OK, so maybe I’m getting a little carried away seeing as how a good coffee is a little easier to find in this city than a good man (sadly). And at, what is it now? Like $10 a cup? Some of you average-cuppa-Joe’s out there may think I’m out of my mind to be dedicating so much time to my morning, afternoon, and sometimes nightly indulgence in roasted beans.
I figure that while it may take more effort and time to reach such a seemingly perfect outcome in anything in life, to me, a coffeeholic of the second largest city in the world next to Tokyo (right?), it’s just like what The Way I See It #157 says: “Some of the best inventive moments were born out of ‘wrong thinking.’ Most people start with the right way so they all follow the same path. The wrong way will lead to mistakes from which you can learn and create new discoveries – the kind of original ideas that come to life when we dare to be different, keep an open mind and have no fear of failure.”
James Dyson said that. And all he did was design a better way to pick up dirt.
March 21, 2007
Location, location, location.
According to this Times article, I live in the most famous and most desired ZIP code in Manhattan and come to it, in all of America. Who would have thought that when I came here a year ago, poor (and mind you, I am still poor) that I was going to find an apartment in the most desired area of the city, able to get bills (that I have a hard time paying) addressed to the 10021 zip code above which my very own name is displayed. With this new zip code-restructuring only eight streets will be able to remain a part of this coveted five-number-identity, and I’m part of the lucky few.
Not that being in an elite zip code fulfills me (though it doesn’t hurt) but it’s nice to feel like you’ve done something right - even if it was only by chance. Everything about New York is about getting what’s better than what the other guy has – the better apartment, the better boyfriend, the better job, the better reservation at the better restaurant, the better friend with the better connections – and I have to admit I’ve been so far outside the competitive loop since I’ve been here (okay job, okay friends, okay and cheap restaurants, no boyfriend) I’ve been starting to feel like an outsider, like a fraud, like a (gasp!) fake. However now (sigh) all is right with the world as I know that I’m currently sitting, sleeping, and spending in the not even better, but best block radius in the country.
However, like any true New Yorker the irony of this little “swish” moment isn’t entirely lost on me. Just like in New York, the 69th to 76th street range of income varies not only from street to street, building to building, but literally apartment door to apartment door. Dolores, across the hall from me, lives in lush conditions. I happened to knock on her door a few weeks ago to borrow some cinnamon for my apple spice cake (I know, how un-glamorous, do people in 10021 even bake? I’m sure they pay people do to that…) and caught a glimpse of her big screen television (she is old, perhaps she can’t see well), her two couches, (I barely have one) and the realization that she has the whole apartment to herself and her cat. I share my apartment with a roommate and barely have enough money left over after rent to buy traditional spices. So while she fumbled around in the kitchen I did the quick math, multiply by two, carry the one…Dolores is rich!
After her “here you go, dear,” I went back to my half-her-size home and felt a pang of sadness. Not only is the person across the hall from me making lots more money than me, (she could afford to give me the entire cinnamon container, insisting that I keep it), she doesn’t even have a job. Can I really live in 10021 under the guise of such affluence? Can everyone else in this zip code detect my lack of prosperity, possessions and cooking powders in my pied-á-terre?
Thirty minutes at 350 degrees later I decided that yes, I can live here, as I have been for a year and regardless of wealth its been working out OK for me. No one has to know I bake my own cakes, or borrow cinnamon from Dolores, or live on a shockingly low amount of money per month post rent (and taxes), or share my place with someone else.
It’s OK that in New York, and 10021, so many people are nouveau riche, and I am nouveau poor. Because any true New Yorker will tell you that no matter what zip code you happen to reside in, perception (over reality), is nine-tenths of the game anyway.
Not that being in an elite zip code fulfills me (though it doesn’t hurt) but it’s nice to feel like you’ve done something right - even if it was only by chance. Everything about New York is about getting what’s better than what the other guy has – the better apartment, the better boyfriend, the better job, the better reservation at the better restaurant, the better friend with the better connections – and I have to admit I’ve been so far outside the competitive loop since I’ve been here (okay job, okay friends, okay and cheap restaurants, no boyfriend) I’ve been starting to feel like an outsider, like a fraud, like a (gasp!) fake. However now (sigh) all is right with the world as I know that I’m currently sitting, sleeping, and spending in the not even better, but best block radius in the country.
However, like any true New Yorker the irony of this little “swish” moment isn’t entirely lost on me. Just like in New York, the 69th to 76th street range of income varies not only from street to street, building to building, but literally apartment door to apartment door. Dolores, across the hall from me, lives in lush conditions. I happened to knock on her door a few weeks ago to borrow some cinnamon for my apple spice cake (I know, how un-glamorous, do people in 10021 even bake? I’m sure they pay people do to that…) and caught a glimpse of her big screen television (she is old, perhaps she can’t see well), her two couches, (I barely have one) and the realization that she has the whole apartment to herself and her cat. I share my apartment with a roommate and barely have enough money left over after rent to buy traditional spices. So while she fumbled around in the kitchen I did the quick math, multiply by two, carry the one…Dolores is rich!
After her “here you go, dear,” I went back to my half-her-size home and felt a pang of sadness. Not only is the person across the hall from me making lots more money than me, (she could afford to give me the entire cinnamon container, insisting that I keep it), she doesn’t even have a job. Can I really live in 10021 under the guise of such affluence? Can everyone else in this zip code detect my lack of prosperity, possessions and cooking powders in my pied-á-terre?
Thirty minutes at 350 degrees later I decided that yes, I can live here, as I have been for a year and regardless of wealth its been working out OK for me. No one has to know I bake my own cakes, or borrow cinnamon from Dolores, or live on a shockingly low amount of money per month post rent (and taxes), or share my place with someone else.
It’s OK that in New York, and 10021, so many people are nouveau riche, and I am nouveau poor. Because any true New Yorker will tell you that no matter what zip code you happen to reside in, perception (over reality), is nine-tenths of the game anyway.
March 18, 2007
Times they are a-changin'
I think the last of the snow has fallen on Manhattan. The season is ending and people will stop talking now about the snow and the cold and start talking about how the temperature is rising more and more, how soon summer will be here and we’ll all be feeling a lot better to be outside, to be walking around this city and not trapped indoors, in our tall and small apartment buildings piled one on top of one wishing we could open our windows and make the city our back porches.
It happens quickly and the pulse of the place changes, and maybe then when the weather gets warmer I won’t feel so much like all I want to do is simply disappear. Because it’s like the more you dig your hands into your pockets the more everything catches up to you. It’s easy, with your hands reaching for warmth to look at your life and think you’ve got it all wrong, like you should be in some beach house on the water because life’s just too short not to.
Because from street to street you just think - if only I could just go somewhere else and meet new people, things would be better. If only I could just skip town and go somewhere warm, somewhere new, somewhere where nobody knows my name or my past or my face, I could be happy.
Being in a city surrounded by so many people sometimes all you want to do is just disappear, go somewhere where you don’t have to fight to push past them on the sidewalk, those people who always stand in the middle talking, the women with strollers, the tourists with cameras. If only you could just go somewhere where you felt like you could breathe more, and start over and create a new past in those moments when all you want to do is forget the one you already have.
You think that if only you could go somewhere where you wouldn’t be so afraid of what you wanted, where you’d have the space and time to figure it out, you’d get through the rough patches where nothing makes sense, where your life just feels like these endless passing weeks of sameness, of people on sidewalks and in subways and in elevators all trying to get somewhere else all the time, and you – you feeling like you’re stuck in the middle of this moving mass without a clear destination at all.
But you keep on, you keep on hopping over snow banks on street corners, and digging your hands deeper into your pockets to find warmth as you walk from block to block, giving up on pushing past people and letting your own pace sink in, letting yourself take the time to live more deliberately, because you know it won’t be lasting much longer.
And you realize that your past isn’t yours anymore anyway because everything has changed, and no matter how much you may want to you can’t get it back, and as unclear as the future is, as monotonous and unsure as it may look from here, from your vantage point of hopping over snow banks on street corners, you have no choice but to venture into it. Because If Only is always just If Only if you want to live more deliberately.
The city, like life, waits for no one. So you have to believe in it, even when you want to give up, because if you keep living your life on If Onlys you may never be able to catch up with it.
It happens quickly and the pulse of the place changes, and maybe then when the weather gets warmer I won’t feel so much like all I want to do is simply disappear. Because it’s like the more you dig your hands into your pockets the more everything catches up to you. It’s easy, with your hands reaching for warmth to look at your life and think you’ve got it all wrong, like you should be in some beach house on the water because life’s just too short not to.
Because from street to street you just think - if only I could just go somewhere else and meet new people, things would be better. If only I could just skip town and go somewhere warm, somewhere new, somewhere where nobody knows my name or my past or my face, I could be happy.
Being in a city surrounded by so many people sometimes all you want to do is just disappear, go somewhere where you don’t have to fight to push past them on the sidewalk, those people who always stand in the middle talking, the women with strollers, the tourists with cameras. If only you could just go somewhere where you felt like you could breathe more, and start over and create a new past in those moments when all you want to do is forget the one you already have.
You think that if only you could go somewhere where you wouldn’t be so afraid of what you wanted, where you’d have the space and time to figure it out, you’d get through the rough patches where nothing makes sense, where your life just feels like these endless passing weeks of sameness, of people on sidewalks and in subways and in elevators all trying to get somewhere else all the time, and you – you feeling like you’re stuck in the middle of this moving mass without a clear destination at all.
But you keep on, you keep on hopping over snow banks on street corners, and digging your hands deeper into your pockets to find warmth as you walk from block to block, giving up on pushing past people and letting your own pace sink in, letting yourself take the time to live more deliberately, because you know it won’t be lasting much longer.
And you realize that your past isn’t yours anymore anyway because everything has changed, and no matter how much you may want to you can’t get it back, and as unclear as the future is, as monotonous and unsure as it may look from here, from your vantage point of hopping over snow banks on street corners, you have no choice but to venture into it. Because If Only is always just If Only if you want to live more deliberately.
The city, like life, waits for no one. So you have to believe in it, even when you want to give up, because if you keep living your life on If Onlys you may never be able to catch up with it.
March 11, 2007
preferred amnesia
I have the uncanny ability of holding onto certain things for far longer than I should. Like the napkin from a bar in which I wrote the note: learn better how to let go.
I still have pictures and clothes and books that I’ve already seen and over-worn and more than three-times-read taking up space in my new life, things that are directly associated with parts of my past that I’m not ready to let go of just yet.
They’re like the stupid souvenirs that the tourists buy, the t-shirts that say NEW YORK on them as though the tourists are going to forget they came here without those letters on their chest there to remind them.
Because you remember NEW YORK like you remember your first love. You remember how it felt, what it meant to you, and how difficult it was to leave it behind. In the city you’ll remember how it felt to be there, to stand among its people, amidst its buildings, in the throes of other peoples lives - and it’s not like you’re going to forget all that when the t-shirt, like love, becomes worn and torn, becomes a rag and eventually has to be thrown away. You’ll still remember even then, with the shirt long gone, how it felt.
NEW YORK and love and the things you can’t leave behind are like the monkey bars. I never liked the monkey bars as a kid - legs swinging, hands holding on trying to propel myself forward just to get to the other end. For wouldn’t it have been easier, faster, less painful just to walk? But we come to know, (and sometimes too late) that anything that’s worth anything never comes easy.
And like the monkey bars - NEW YORK and love and the things you can’t leave behind - the tighter you let yourself grip them, the longer it takes for those red marks, those almost-blisters, to fade away.
I still have pictures and clothes and books that I’ve already seen and over-worn and more than three-times-read taking up space in my new life, things that are directly associated with parts of my past that I’m not ready to let go of just yet.
They’re like the stupid souvenirs that the tourists buy, the t-shirts that say NEW YORK on them as though the tourists are going to forget they came here without those letters on their chest there to remind them.
Because you remember NEW YORK like you remember your first love. You remember how it felt, what it meant to you, and how difficult it was to leave it behind. In the city you’ll remember how it felt to be there, to stand among its people, amidst its buildings, in the throes of other peoples lives - and it’s not like you’re going to forget all that when the t-shirt, like love, becomes worn and torn, becomes a rag and eventually has to be thrown away. You’ll still remember even then, with the shirt long gone, how it felt.
NEW YORK and love and the things you can’t leave behind are like the monkey bars. I never liked the monkey bars as a kid - legs swinging, hands holding on trying to propel myself forward just to get to the other end. For wouldn’t it have been easier, faster, less painful just to walk? But we come to know, (and sometimes too late) that anything that’s worth anything never comes easy.
And like the monkey bars - NEW YORK and love and the things you can’t leave behind - the tighter you let yourself grip them, the longer it takes for those red marks, those almost-blisters, to fade away.
March 2, 2007
There are certain New York days that can make or break you.
And being stuck underground on the subway between 50th street and 42nd street for a half hour can certainly finish the task of making you never want to spend one more minute in a place that can’t handle a little water in it’s underground transportation system.
I had a feeling this morning, with the rain coming down as it was, that it wasn’t going to be an easy commute. Getting on the bus with the windows all fogged and that pungent smell of sweat and soaked wool, I thought to myself: it’s just one day.
Flash forward to 50th street when the 1 train stopped, doors open, so that the train conductor could ask over the loudspeaker for anyone who was a doctor, as there was a “sick person on the platform.” Everyone turned, strained their necks in one succinct motion towards the open doors to try to see the injured civilian. People all tell themselves they don’t want to look at the exact moment they do. Some began to leave the train, (hopefully to assist), and soon we were creeping out of 50th street, when about ten seconds later, we were at a stand-still.
Being underground like that and looking from dark window to dark window, I realized that my supposed fear of small confined spaces was, in fact, real. Everyone around me just seemed exasperated, rolling their eyes as that loudspeaker voice you can never really understand went about repeating the same thing every two minutes:“Mrrrrrwerearrrrestop…momen…rily. Mrrrrrrthank…for…atience.”
Of course of all the people on all the trains in all the world I was stuck standing next to a guy who couldn’t handle himself. He couldn’t handle the fact that this was really happening to him and choose to talk to me (or to himself, I’m not sure) about how he felt about it: “I mean you’ve got to be kidding me! C’mon, say it again man, just tell me one more time that we’re stopped, like I can’t already see that, like I’m some sort of gosh darn idiot, like I was just born yesterday. And thank me again for my gosh darn patience, just do it man, c’mon, just one more gosh darn time.”
I tried to give him a withering smile of camaraderie, to silently tell him that I too was fighting the battle of living in Manhattan.
He didn’t seem to care. And he didn’t say gosh darn, either.
30 minutes and an almost panic-attack later, I got off the 1 at 42nd street after it officially stopping running. The express wasn’t working either and I flew up the stairs into the pouring rain to try to catch a cab. But any New Yorker knows that trying to find a cab in the middle of Times Square in the rain is about as easy as finishing a Rubick’s cube in under 5 seconds. First the red, then the green…
I walked for blocks, soaked, hauling my duffle bag because of course, this is the weekend I’ve chosen to go out of town. As fire trucks scream past me, crowds of people with umbrellas push around me, I thought: this is a nightmare.
A few blocks later, soaked through and not an empty cab in sight, I found myself back at the subway, finally realizing that I could take the A/C/E to Spring street and walk to work from there. On the E, I’m stuck standing next to two guys who’ve chosen to sleep on the seats next to me, by far creating the most unpleasant smell I’d had to deal with so far that morning. Right before I get off at Spring, one of them wakes up, grabs a huge jar of Jiffy peanut butter out from one of his many trash-filled bags at his feet, and starts eating large finger-fulls. Soon, all of his fingers are covered in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, and just before the doors open he looks up at me, gives me a smile consisting of about three teeth altogether, points his sticky fingers at me and says, “ya like some butta, hun?”
On the walk to the office I pass a Starbucks and naturally go in to buy a venti house blend because I feel like I deserve it after the morning I’ve just had. I am now officially an hour late for work, and try to walk into the office unnoticed. Of course, soaking wet with running mascara and a venti Starbucks cup( with The Way I See It #184), is anything but discreet. I make it to my desk fearing the wrath of my superiors, while reading #184, “…only an idiot sets out to find the poorhouse, not to mention devote himself to something he doesn’t love. Instead, I discovered an interesting back road to the unknown, and deliberately without a safety net.”
While getting over my anger at the MTA I think that this city is like one huge back road about 100 feet in the air with nothing but empty space under you, and some days it’s easier to let yourself fall than others. But you just always have to remember, that, like today, just two hours later, it stops raining, and the sun comes out again.
I (still) heart NY.
I had a feeling this morning, with the rain coming down as it was, that it wasn’t going to be an easy commute. Getting on the bus with the windows all fogged and that pungent smell of sweat and soaked wool, I thought to myself: it’s just one day.
Flash forward to 50th street when the 1 train stopped, doors open, so that the train conductor could ask over the loudspeaker for anyone who was a doctor, as there was a “sick person on the platform.” Everyone turned, strained their necks in one succinct motion towards the open doors to try to see the injured civilian. People all tell themselves they don’t want to look at the exact moment they do. Some began to leave the train, (hopefully to assist), and soon we were creeping out of 50th street, when about ten seconds later, we were at a stand-still.
Being underground like that and looking from dark window to dark window, I realized that my supposed fear of small confined spaces was, in fact, real. Everyone around me just seemed exasperated, rolling their eyes as that loudspeaker voice you can never really understand went about repeating the same thing every two minutes:“Mrrrrrwerearrrrestop…momen…rily. Mrrrrrrthank…for…atience.”
Of course of all the people on all the trains in all the world I was stuck standing next to a guy who couldn’t handle himself. He couldn’t handle the fact that this was really happening to him and choose to talk to me (or to himself, I’m not sure) about how he felt about it: “I mean you’ve got to be kidding me! C’mon, say it again man, just tell me one more time that we’re stopped, like I can’t already see that, like I’m some sort of gosh darn idiot, like I was just born yesterday. And thank me again for my gosh darn patience, just do it man, c’mon, just one more gosh darn time.”
I tried to give him a withering smile of camaraderie, to silently tell him that I too was fighting the battle of living in Manhattan.
He didn’t seem to care. And he didn’t say gosh darn, either.
30 minutes and an almost panic-attack later, I got off the 1 at 42nd street after it officially stopping running. The express wasn’t working either and I flew up the stairs into the pouring rain to try to catch a cab. But any New Yorker knows that trying to find a cab in the middle of Times Square in the rain is about as easy as finishing a Rubick’s cube in under 5 seconds. First the red, then the green…
I walked for blocks, soaked, hauling my duffle bag because of course, this is the weekend I’ve chosen to go out of town. As fire trucks scream past me, crowds of people with umbrellas push around me, I thought: this is a nightmare.
A few blocks later, soaked through and not an empty cab in sight, I found myself back at the subway, finally realizing that I could take the A/C/E to Spring street and walk to work from there. On the E, I’m stuck standing next to two guys who’ve chosen to sleep on the seats next to me, by far creating the most unpleasant smell I’d had to deal with so far that morning. Right before I get off at Spring, one of them wakes up, grabs a huge jar of Jiffy peanut butter out from one of his many trash-filled bags at his feet, and starts eating large finger-fulls. Soon, all of his fingers are covered in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, and just before the doors open he looks up at me, gives me a smile consisting of about three teeth altogether, points his sticky fingers at me and says, “ya like some butta, hun?”
On the walk to the office I pass a Starbucks and naturally go in to buy a venti house blend because I feel like I deserve it after the morning I’ve just had. I am now officially an hour late for work, and try to walk into the office unnoticed. Of course, soaking wet with running mascara and a venti Starbucks cup( with The Way I See It #184), is anything but discreet. I make it to my desk fearing the wrath of my superiors, while reading #184, “…only an idiot sets out to find the poorhouse, not to mention devote himself to something he doesn’t love. Instead, I discovered an interesting back road to the unknown, and deliberately without a safety net.”
While getting over my anger at the MTA I think that this city is like one huge back road about 100 feet in the air with nothing but empty space under you, and some days it’s easier to let yourself fall than others. But you just always have to remember, that, like today, just two hours later, it stops raining, and the sun comes out again.
I (still) heart NY.
February 27, 2007
There are 312 hours in a day.
Suddenly it’s Tuesday. Monday seemed like it lasted for about five minutes and the commute from home to office to work now feels like a blur. What is it about time and how it callously functions on it’s own schedule without any regard to people’s lives. I need weekends to be longer, my limited free time after work before I fall asleep (only to wake up at 3AM unable to fall back to sleep) to feel like days not mere hours.
I woke up a 6:59 this morning. You know how you do that, wake up on your own seconds before your alarm is slated to go off? It’s sort of disgusting, really. Am I so trained now that I no longer need that irritating, bone-shaking beep beep beeping of the alarm in the morning to get me going? Is my life on such a regimented track that it’s come to this – my own biological clock subconsciously getting me up and getting me to work without my brain even realizing it?
Suddenly it’s Tuesday and I desperately need it to be Friday and I can already tell that time is going to be a real jerk today and take its sweet little time. 10AM will feel like 1PM, 2 will feel like 5, 6 will feel like…midnight.
So trained am I that I was on the subway and almost to my stop when looking back I didn’t entirely remember walking out of my apartment. Or getting on the bus, or getting off the bus on 72nd and Amsterdam and getting on the 1, or putting clothes on for that matter. It’s like those scary moments when you’re driving, cruising at 65 (or really 75, but that’s neither here nor there), and you’ve moved from exit 3 to about exit 15 and you don’t remember passing by 4 through 14? You remember that at one point you were singing aloud to Air Supply, thinking that you really are all out of love, until scarily you pass exit 15 with an open-mouthed look of “wha??” and swear never repeat the incident to anyone, ever again (including the singing).
The only thing that snapped me out of it, causing me to look up from my book, was when the doors opened at 34th street and there was a man playing the saxophone on the platform in front of the cracked Penn. Station sign. The sound of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, not quite at the right 5/4 time signature speed, (this guy was no Paul Desmond), but I realized I was almost at work, and yes, thankfully, had clothes on.
Tuesday had officially begun, and Wednesday, slow to be sure, is only about 312 hours away.
I woke up a 6:59 this morning. You know how you do that, wake up on your own seconds before your alarm is slated to go off? It’s sort of disgusting, really. Am I so trained now that I no longer need that irritating, bone-shaking beep beep beeping of the alarm in the morning to get me going? Is my life on such a regimented track that it’s come to this – my own biological clock subconsciously getting me up and getting me to work without my brain even realizing it?
Suddenly it’s Tuesday and I desperately need it to be Friday and I can already tell that time is going to be a real jerk today and take its sweet little time. 10AM will feel like 1PM, 2 will feel like 5, 6 will feel like…midnight.
So trained am I that I was on the subway and almost to my stop when looking back I didn’t entirely remember walking out of my apartment. Or getting on the bus, or getting off the bus on 72nd and Amsterdam and getting on the 1, or putting clothes on for that matter. It’s like those scary moments when you’re driving, cruising at 65 (or really 75, but that’s neither here nor there), and you’ve moved from exit 3 to about exit 15 and you don’t remember passing by 4 through 14? You remember that at one point you were singing aloud to Air Supply, thinking that you really are all out of love, until scarily you pass exit 15 with an open-mouthed look of “wha??” and swear never repeat the incident to anyone, ever again (including the singing).
The only thing that snapped me out of it, causing me to look up from my book, was when the doors opened at 34th street and there was a man playing the saxophone on the platform in front of the cracked Penn. Station sign. The sound of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, not quite at the right 5/4 time signature speed, (this guy was no Paul Desmond), but I realized I was almost at work, and yes, thankfully, had clothes on.
Tuesday had officially begun, and Wednesday, slow to be sure, is only about 312 hours away.
February 22, 2007
Stop the world, I want to get off.
You like to think you’ve changed, but know that in a lot of ways, you haven’t changed at all. You’re still stupid, still think you can have control over your life, over what happens and who you let yourself care about - as though the heart has some sort of power button, a dimmer switch with the ability to bypass mistakes and regrets and skip out on the bad memories of the past that you can never seem to really ever let go of.
They keep resurfacing. And the time it may take for it all to really go away feels like too much. Infinitely too much.
Until time and feelings are all wrapped together in one hurdling mass, headed right for your heart, causing it to explode. And then you look at it, in little pieces on the floor, sections of days and months and moments. There it is. Your life staring back at you, showing you everything you did wrong, everything you regret, everything that now, seems so painfully clear.
Stay away, the pieces show you. Run. You will only get hurt. But when it comes to our hearts, we don’t know any better, and we always think that we do.
It creeps up on us when we least expect it. The sound of a name or the scent of an old perfume, and suddenly we’re back there, in the thick of our almost tangible memories, when our hearts were still intact, before the damage was done.
We go on. The bruises heal and this strong muscle keeps beating no matter how much you say you don’t care anymore if it stops. It repairs. It inwardly fixes itself, and you find you’re unable to let anything come near it: no caffeine, no trans-fats, not one day without exercise.
You tell yourself you have no choice now put to protect it. And so you continue on. Careful, guarded. Your heart in an icebox. Preserved. Protected. Numb. You don’t know if that will change. So you stop asking yourself the question.
It is what it is and there’s no going back, no stopping the world. And in the time it took for it to fall apart you think it will take five times as long for it to come back together again. Because it’s always easier to break something than it is to rebuild it. In the heated emotional moment it takes to throw a punch - hours have to follow in order for the swelling to go down, weeks for the bruise to fade. And that little scar in the corner of your eye never seems to ever really go away.
It lingers. A constant reminder of our mistakes, our lost opportunities, our bad luck, our bad timing or whatever it is that makes certain things happen to us at the moments they do. But we move forward. We have no other choice. We eventually accept that it is what it is, that there’s no going back, no stopping the world.
They keep resurfacing. And the time it may take for it all to really go away feels like too much. Infinitely too much.
Until time and feelings are all wrapped together in one hurdling mass, headed right for your heart, causing it to explode. And then you look at it, in little pieces on the floor, sections of days and months and moments. There it is. Your life staring back at you, showing you everything you did wrong, everything you regret, everything that now, seems so painfully clear.
Stay away, the pieces show you. Run. You will only get hurt. But when it comes to our hearts, we don’t know any better, and we always think that we do.
It creeps up on us when we least expect it. The sound of a name or the scent of an old perfume, and suddenly we’re back there, in the thick of our almost tangible memories, when our hearts were still intact, before the damage was done.
We go on. The bruises heal and this strong muscle keeps beating no matter how much you say you don’t care anymore if it stops. It repairs. It inwardly fixes itself, and you find you’re unable to let anything come near it: no caffeine, no trans-fats, not one day without exercise.
You tell yourself you have no choice now put to protect it. And so you continue on. Careful, guarded. Your heart in an icebox. Preserved. Protected. Numb. You don’t know if that will change. So you stop asking yourself the question.
It is what it is and there’s no going back, no stopping the world. And in the time it took for it to fall apart you think it will take five times as long for it to come back together again. Because it’s always easier to break something than it is to rebuild it. In the heated emotional moment it takes to throw a punch - hours have to follow in order for the swelling to go down, weeks for the bruise to fade. And that little scar in the corner of your eye never seems to ever really go away.
It lingers. A constant reminder of our mistakes, our lost opportunities, our bad luck, our bad timing or whatever it is that makes certain things happen to us at the moments they do. But we move forward. We have no other choice. We eventually accept that it is what it is, that there’s no going back, no stopping the world.
February 16, 2007
Honesty is such a lonely word.
Because no matter how old you get, when it comes to relationships, you still have no idea what you’re doing.
There are two people in my life who have, for as long as I can remember, had the most difficult time being honest. I’m not sure if it’s just honesty that’s the real problem here, or if it’s also due to their combined inability (let’s call them Jack and Jill) to figure out what they actually want. While I know that men and women love, and are very good at, playing games, and that they are so intrinsically different that most of the time I wonder how it is that relationships ever work at all – but you’d think that after all these two have been through (read: heartbreak, waiting out other relationships, drunken text messages, hours spent on carefully crafted emails, planned weekends away, trying to figure out what planned weekend away meant, more text messages…), that they’d want to capitalize on all this effort that they’ve expensed on not making the relationship work, and actually just be together.
But then again, just being together is difficult. No one seems to really know how to make that Being Together thing happen. Before the be-all-end-all of marriage, there isn’t a handbook, a guide, a signed contract that you can simply hand to the other person and say “here, sign this and we’ll, you know, like be together.” However Being Together inevitably takes having to communicate to the other person that you do, indeed, want to be together - and we all know that telling someone how you really feel is the emotional equivalent to standing in the middle of a busy street stark naked.
Remember when you were twelve, and that guy who was playing footsie with you under the table in the library sent his friend to ask you how you really felt about him? And then once the courage was worked up, Footsie Guy actually came up to you and said something like, “Hey Sara, look at me! I’ve got arms! Do think you'd want to be like, boyfriendgirlfriend maybe?” Maybe we all need to go back to such simplistic ways of communicating instead of spending months trying say that exact thing we feel without actually saying anything at all.
Jack and Jill are not, I believe, the first people in the world to forgo honesty. Women are too afraid to want what they want at the risk of losing the man they want - so they keep their mouths shut and pretend that “this is whatever it is, ok?” is enough for them. But it’s never just whatever it is. It’s always more or not enough and they’re left waiting it out, waiting and hoping to see if the other person will eventually grow up and mature to the level of the normal human understanding that when it comes to peoples hearts, “whatever it is,” isn’t anything to hang your hopes on.
And while I know men typically stay away from anything having to do with the words “feelings,” “commitment,” and “laundry,” as though they were black death itself, I find it hard to believe that they can be so afraid of honesty that they’d be willing to risk their own happiness because of it.
What we need to do is try to get back to our emotional roots, before we were exposed to the cruel world of rejection and loneliness as adults, back to the time when playground politics ruled and liking someone was as real and straightforward as PB&J.
Because isn’t honesty, when it comes to how we feel, really the best policy? Wouldn’t you hate to be Jack in ten years, waking up only to realize that you had spent the majority of your early-adulthood bouncing around between relationships you didn’t really care about just because you were too afraid (or too stupid) to go after what you really wanted?
Tsk tsk. It’s time to speak up - Footsie Guy wouldn’t approve of anything less.
There are two people in my life who have, for as long as I can remember, had the most difficult time being honest. I’m not sure if it’s just honesty that’s the real problem here, or if it’s also due to their combined inability (let’s call them Jack and Jill) to figure out what they actually want. While I know that men and women love, and are very good at, playing games, and that they are so intrinsically different that most of the time I wonder how it is that relationships ever work at all – but you’d think that after all these two have been through (read: heartbreak, waiting out other relationships, drunken text messages, hours spent on carefully crafted emails, planned weekends away, trying to figure out what planned weekend away meant, more text messages…), that they’d want to capitalize on all this effort that they’ve expensed on not making the relationship work, and actually just be together.
But then again, just being together is difficult. No one seems to really know how to make that Being Together thing happen. Before the be-all-end-all of marriage, there isn’t a handbook, a guide, a signed contract that you can simply hand to the other person and say “here, sign this and we’ll, you know, like be together.” However Being Together inevitably takes having to communicate to the other person that you do, indeed, want to be together - and we all know that telling someone how you really feel is the emotional equivalent to standing in the middle of a busy street stark naked.
Remember when you were twelve, and that guy who was playing footsie with you under the table in the library sent his friend to ask you how you really felt about him? And then once the courage was worked up, Footsie Guy actually came up to you and said something like, “Hey Sara, look at me! I’ve got arms! Do think you'd want to be like, boyfriendgirlfriend maybe?” Maybe we all need to go back to such simplistic ways of communicating instead of spending months trying say that exact thing we feel without actually saying anything at all.
Jack and Jill are not, I believe, the first people in the world to forgo honesty. Women are too afraid to want what they want at the risk of losing the man they want - so they keep their mouths shut and pretend that “this is whatever it is, ok?” is enough for them. But it’s never just whatever it is. It’s always more or not enough and they’re left waiting it out, waiting and hoping to see if the other person will eventually grow up and mature to the level of the normal human understanding that when it comes to peoples hearts, “whatever it is,” isn’t anything to hang your hopes on.
And while I know men typically stay away from anything having to do with the words “feelings,” “commitment,” and “laundry,” as though they were black death itself, I find it hard to believe that they can be so afraid of honesty that they’d be willing to risk their own happiness because of it.
What we need to do is try to get back to our emotional roots, before we were exposed to the cruel world of rejection and loneliness as adults, back to the time when playground politics ruled and liking someone was as real and straightforward as PB&J.
Because isn’t honesty, when it comes to how we feel, really the best policy? Wouldn’t you hate to be Jack in ten years, waking up only to realize that you had spent the majority of your early-adulthood bouncing around between relationships you didn’t really care about just because you were too afraid (or too stupid) to go after what you really wanted?
Tsk tsk. It’s time to speak up - Footsie Guy wouldn’t approve of anything less.
February 14, 2007
Today people talked about snow and love.
They talked about how cold it was outside, how the sleet this morning was pelting down on the top of their heads and the black slushy snow was clogging up the sidewalks. They talked about how much more snow other people got, how Rob in Syracuse got eight feet, and their cousin Rita got three in Chicago. “We were lucky, really,” they said. “Rob was out there shoveling snow that was over his car! You couldn’t see Rob’s car!”
Then they talked about their dinner plans and the flowers they got and the chocolates (that they can’t eat too many of) and teddy bears that were waiting for them at home. They talked about all the money they had to spend in order to keep Jackie happy, how the florist was out of roses this morning (that’s what happens when you wait to the last minute), and how now a card needed to be crafted after their 11AM meeting but before their 3PM out of office letterhead cardstock paper and the markers from the dry erase board in the conference room.
But tonight the snow has stopped, the roads (mainly) are clear. Rob out West might still be in trouble as it doesn’t stop snowing there until May, but Jackie will be happy (though her boyfriend won’t be able to pay March rent)
Snow and love makes everyone crazy, and by tomorrow it will all be gone - the snow anyway.
Then they talked about their dinner plans and the flowers they got and the chocolates (that they can’t eat too many of) and teddy bears that were waiting for them at home. They talked about all the money they had to spend in order to keep Jackie happy, how the florist was out of roses this morning (that’s what happens when you wait to the last minute), and how now a card needed to be crafted after their 11AM meeting but before their 3PM out of office letterhead cardstock paper and the markers from the dry erase board in the conference room.
But tonight the snow has stopped, the roads (mainly) are clear. Rob out West might still be in trouble as it doesn’t stop snowing there until May, but Jackie will be happy (though her boyfriend won’t be able to pay March rent)
Snow and love makes everyone crazy, and by tomorrow it will all be gone - the snow anyway.
February 12, 2007
Suddenly.
Life happens suddenly and it’s easy to forget how fast things can disappear.
Because we can’t think about time and how there isn’t enough of it, because it’s better to hold the hands of those we love than the hands of the clock, as they will always and forever move forward into the unknown, even when we don’t want them to - passing minutes and disappearing seconds that we can’t get back, that we cannot change.
It’s easy to find yourself at the exact moment realizing that everything is perfect a second before it all falls apart. And what do we do with change? Creatures of habit who can’t adapt to a life so drastically different than the one we’ve always known. The past and future are holding hands now, and you, stuck in the middle, don’t feel like time exists at all.
So you run. You run towards those passing minutes and disappearing seconds and try to make the most of them. You try not to Waste. Any. More. Time.
Suddenly. Life happens suddenly and it’s easy to remember how fast everything can change.
Because we can’t think about time and how there isn’t enough of it, because it’s better to hold the hands of those we love than the hands of the clock, as they will always and forever move forward into the unknown, even when we don’t want them to - passing minutes and disappearing seconds that we can’t get back, that we cannot change.
It’s easy to find yourself at the exact moment realizing that everything is perfect a second before it all falls apart. And what do we do with change? Creatures of habit who can’t adapt to a life so drastically different than the one we’ve always known. The past and future are holding hands now, and you, stuck in the middle, don’t feel like time exists at all.
So you run. You run towards those passing minutes and disappearing seconds and try to make the most of them. You try not to Waste. Any. More. Time.
Suddenly. Life happens suddenly and it’s easy to remember how fast everything can change.
February 10, 2007
Only love.
I was eight years old. I was sporting the haircut I had seemingly my entire childhood – short, chin-length with bangs. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car while my mother was driving. My feet didn’t touch the floor and I remember being able to look straight out and see my black and white saddle shoes staring back at me.
She was flipping through the radio stations, trying to find something to settle on for our little journey to the grocery store or wherever it was that we were going that day. I just remember that it was cold, late fall, and I had on my heavy wool navy blue coat that was keeping me insulated and warm as I watched her scan through the FM. I remember how she looked sitting there, the soft profile of her face from my low vantage point, the slow curving of her mouth, her eyes that shifted from the dial to the road to me.
And then she finally found a song - Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart.” As I sat there looking out the window I didn’t understand what Gene was talking about. In fact, it seemed to me that all of the songs she had already passed – actually all of the songs I’d ever heard before – were all talking about the same thing.
So I looked over at her with semi-disgust and asked, “Why are songs always about love?” I remember the way her face looked, glancing down at me with eyes bright, as she smiled before taking a deep breath like she knew something I didn't, and simply responded: “Because what better thing is there in the world to sing about?”
She was flipping through the radio stations, trying to find something to settle on for our little journey to the grocery store or wherever it was that we were going that day. I just remember that it was cold, late fall, and I had on my heavy wool navy blue coat that was keeping me insulated and warm as I watched her scan through the FM. I remember how she looked sitting there, the soft profile of her face from my low vantage point, the slow curving of her mouth, her eyes that shifted from the dial to the road to me.
And then she finally found a song - Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart.” As I sat there looking out the window I didn’t understand what Gene was talking about. In fact, it seemed to me that all of the songs she had already passed – actually all of the songs I’d ever heard before – were all talking about the same thing.
So I looked over at her with semi-disgust and asked, “Why are songs always about love?” I remember the way her face looked, glancing down at me with eyes bright, as she smiled before taking a deep breath like she knew something I didn't, and simply responded: “Because what better thing is there in the world to sing about?”
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